


The Skeleton Winter

by branwyn



Series: Compatible Damage [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Attempted Rape, F/M, Genderswap, PTSD, Suicide, The Dancing Men, casefic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-19
Updated: 2011-12-13
Packaged: 2017-10-26 06:40:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 29,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/279916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/branwyn/pseuds/branwyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Joanna knows that enlisting as the only recruit in Sherlock's private army isn't going to make her less damaged. But Sherlock puts her damage to good use. Joanna thinks that is by far the best thing that could have happened to her. It may, in fact, be the only thing that could have saved her."</p><p>A genderswap AU casefic loosely based on AC Doyle's "The Dancing Men".</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It is November, and what's left of Joanna Watson has returned to England.

Invalided, crippled, and defunct, the worst injury she has sustained is not to her shoulder, or to her leg, but to her way of thinking. She can't see anything in the proper light. Her mind's eye is still blinded by the sun that baked the dirt of Afghanistan. She had been shot. She had lain for hours where she fell, burning with delirium, sticky with blood, covered in dust and flies. She wakes from nightmares with sweat-soaked blankets tangled tight around her neck and shoulders, thinking she's still there, that night has fallen and the misshapen lump under her head is the body of her patrol leader, who died because Joanna lost consciousness, and her hands, applying pressure to the holes in chest, fell slack.

Everything Joanna Watson used to be bled out of her under the glaring eye of a foreign sun. There is nothing for her in England, in the damp, misty grey world outside the windows of her bedsit.

"How do you feel about being home again?" is the very first thing her therapist asks her, because Joanna has no idea how to begin, and Ella thinks the question a safe one.

"It's fine," says Joanna. She looks to the left, and to the right. There are wide, bare picture windows in Ella's office, and the room is filled with milky winter light. "Bad weather."

Ella tracks the movement of her eye. A moment of silence passes, then she suggests Joanna might acquire a UV lamp.

At first, Joanna makes an effort in therapy, makes an effort with her sister, because human contact, however uncomfortable, at least makes her feel something. But even that changes, the discomfort worn away by the monotony of routine. The days stretch on, interminable in their sameness, and Joanna becomes aware that the inside of her head is as grey and featureless as the view from the window of her bedsit.

One night she wakes from a nightmare, hair clinging damply to the back of her neck, and gasps out a sob. She rolls onto her back and stares up at the ceiling, wondering how she is meant to live in a world that so obviously no longer has any place for her, when she no longer has the strength of will to make a place for herself.

She thinks about the gun in the drawer of her desk, and wonders if somewhere in that thought lies a false assumption.

*

Sherlock Holmes is bloody amazing. In the winter of her mind he is fire on the frost, a beacon in the fog.

He may be the first person since the war who has looked at Joanna and really, properly _seen_ her. Not just a short, wasted woman with awkward chin-length hair and dubiously feminine scar tissue, but the lost soldier in search of a new mission.

Sherlock has purpose, and all the arrogant self-assurance of a man who has carved out his own place in life, in the teeth of everyone who ever told him that he didn't fit, that he didn't belong. This, even more than his rapid-fire brilliance, is what draws Joanna in. She craves that sort of devil-may-care, I-may-be-a-freak-but-you-need-me nonchalance that Sherlock exudes. And thanks to Sherlock, she finds some small part of it, because Sherlock doubts everything but himself, and since he wastes no time conceiving of Joanna as an extension of himself, there is no room for doubt where she is concerned, either.

"You are very loyal, very quickly," Mycroft Holmes says to her, sounding amused, skeptical, as though he suspects Joanna is acting a part to him, for some reason of her own.

But the reason for her loyalty is very simple, and the fact that Mycroft doesn't see it tells her that even his frightening omniscience has limits.

People come to a point in their lives when they have only two choices left: to change, or to die.

Since Afghanistan, Joanna has been, not a woman, but a ghost haunting a woman's body. When she meets Sherlock, she is weeks, maybe days, from making that final decision to--move on. As ghosts are meant to do.

But Sherlock expects things from her. And Joanna takes astonishing pleasure in rising to his challenges.

She knows that enlisting as the only recruit in Sherlock's private army isn't going to make her less damaged. But Sherlock puts her damage to good use. Joanna thinks that is by far the best thing that could have happened to her.

It may, in fact, be the only thing that could have saved her.

So it doesn't surprise her in the least that she chooses to kill a man for Sherlock's sake less than 24 hours after she meets him. Killing is lawful for a soldier under one of two conditions: to save her own life, or the life of a brother-in-arms.

When Joanna kills for Sherlock, both conditions are met.

*

Objectively speaking, Joanna knows that Sherlock is fucking gorgeous. Not her type, exactly, except in the sense that anyone as beautiful as Sherlock is everyone's type.

And, objectively speaking, Joanna knows that she is attractive to some men, Sherlock probably included. But coming from anyone other than Sherlock, that sort of attention repulses her. Since getting shot, Joanna looks at herself in the mirror and sees a stranger. Where once she was sturdy and solid, now she appears frail. She never regained the weight and muscle mass she lost in the hospital, and she is thirty-six now--far from old, but past the age where complete recovery would have been possible. She knows that many men find fragile-looking women appealing, but she can't help feeling, however irrationally, that the men who like her like this are rejecting, betraying the woman she used to be. She finds them contemptible, for not preferring her old strength.

Sherlock is different. He hardly seems to notice her appearance, except when it offers data to help him puzzle out the things about her he still finds mysterious.

"You've just applied perfume, which means you're also wearing make-up," he calls to her from the sitting room, while she's standing in front of the loo mirror, getting ready to go out. "You only wear perfume and make-up when you're going to see your sister, because she nags you when she doesn't feel you've taken sufficient pains with your toilette. She thinks you should find a man to date, to lessen my influence over you."

Joanna knows that Sherlock is attracted to her, because in a world where appealing to a man's sexuality can lead to marriage or to murder, every woman over the age of thirteen is a master of observation and deduction. She's not sure if Sherlock's noticed that he's attracted to her, though, because dating isn't his area, which means that in some ways he is very stupid indeed.

It doesn't really matter to her whether he notices or not. If they did anything about it, chances are good that it would go spectacularly wrong, and she would lose him, and then she would lose everything.

She is attracted to Sherlock almost in spite of his being gorgeous. If she passed him in the street, she would dismiss him, not so much as being out of her league as being below her level. She would never look at a man who looked like Sherlock and suspect him of being brilliant. In that sense, he must know a little of what it feels like to be a woman.

Sherlock appeals to Joanna's sexuality in a primal way that no amount of physical beauty could possibly do. These days, he is the only person on planet earth who can draw her out of her mind and back into her body. Forced introspection is dangerous for someone in Joanna's condition, and she was a woman of action even before she became so spectacularly broken. _In her body_ is precisely where she wants to be.

But during the dry spells, when there aren't any cases on, and too many predictable, colorless days pass in a row, Joanna realizes that her ability to tolerate the inside of her own head depends entirely on Sherlock being there to drag her out of it. The same stagnation that drives Sherlock to shoot at the wall and take drugs makes Joanna sit in her room, with her back to the grey world outside her window, and clean her gun.

Appearances are deceptive. Physically, Joanna looks slight, but she is much stronger than she seems. Mentally, even Sherlock thinks she's sane enough to be going on with, but Joanna knows that, not long ago, she was half prepared to put the Browning to a more ignoble use than it had seen before.

She is two, maybe two and a half weeks of trying and failing to live a normal, risk-free life, before that starts to feel like a viable solution again.

Joanna _needs_ the work. In this, she and Sherlock are more alike than he may ever realize.

*

Because the quiet is dangerous, and because it has been quiet for nine fuzzy, snow-grey days when she finds the first letter, Joanna's response is not precisely--rational.

To the casual reader, the letter might pass for nothing more sinister than a love note from a secret admirer--an awkward admirer, certainly, to declare himself by such primary-school methods, but nothing to worry about, maybe even tantalizing to one's vanity. But to the trained eye (and Joanna's must qualify, by now) the author is obviously in a dangerous frame of mind. He wants Joanna, but he believes she has already rejected him. He is rather angry about that.

Automatically, she puts the letter aside to take home to Sherlock. Then she pauses. Looks at the letter again.

Places it in the bottom drawer of her file cabinet, then locks it.

Another woman might keep the letter secret because she was frightened, or in denial as to what it means. Joanna decides to keep it secret because it is a puzzle. Because it might be a bit dangerous. And because, if Sherlock gets anywhere near it, the whole thing will be over in two seconds flat. It is only a flimsy little mystery, and it will evaporate like a drop of water in the inferno of his intellect.

Joanna doesn't want it to be over. It is something new to think about, after all, and it may eventually give her something to do. She is in rather desperate need of both those things. Besides, the risk, at present, is negligible. Joanna knows a thing or two about cases like this. There will be several degrees of escalation before the risk spreads from her to the people around her.

There is time, in other words, to enjoy it.

 _I am completely cracked,_ she thinks, and then dismisses the thought. It isn't exactly new information.

In exposing herself to a calculated degree of risk, she is taking care of herself in the only way she knows that works. Her sister, to say nothing of her therapist, would probably have her sectioned, but their opinions ceased to be relevant when they proved useless in fighting the static in her head.

What Sherlock will think, she's not precisely certain. But that is partly the point.

*

Two more letters arrive in the mail over the next seven days, their contents in much the same vein as the first. Joanna reads them carefully, extracts all the clues they seem to offer, then files them away, with a satisfied little hum.

It doesn't cure her, by any stretch. The monotony is still oppressive. Sherlock disappears for three days to live with the homeless, in the hopes of sniffing out a case that hasn't yet come to the attention of Lestrade. He doesn't invite Joanna to join him, and she puts twelve hour shifts in at the clinic, not because the work is a very effective distraction, but because she hopes to spot a likely candidate for her letter-writer among her repeat patients.

On the fourth day of Sherlock's absence, another letter arrives, and Joanna, reading it, recognizes the escalation she has been waiting for. Her admirer is more than angry, now. He wants to punish her for not noticing him.

But Joanna doesn't have time to make up her mind whether it's time to do something about the situation, because finally, _finally,_ Sherlock texts her: _new case. come home at once._

In an almost more than metaphorical sense, sunlight cracks the heavy winter clouds in her brain, and she barely pauses to lock the latest letter away before she grabs for her coat.


	2. Chapter 2

2.

Approximately eight-and-three-quarters minutes after Joanna reaches Baker Street, she splits the first two knuckles of her left hand punching Sherlock in the face.

He doesn't even see it coming, which is inexcusable, and ends up on his arse, gaping up at her from the floor. Seeing his normally keen features hanging slack in astonishment, Joanna gets even angrier than she was the moment _before_ she hit him, which really doesn't bode well for Sherlock. He seems to sense this much, at least, because he scoots backwards on the carpet then pushes himself to his feet, maintaining a wary distance from her.

"Are you hallucinating?" He rakes her with his gaze, no doubt analyzing her respiration and pupil dilation or the pattern of wrinkles around the midriff of her blouse or some such nonsense. "Perhaps you were gassed at the clinic?"

Joanna doesn't reply. Instead, she opens her right hand, the one holding the small glass vial she found in a repurposed paracetamol bottle in the loo cupboard. She holds it up for just a second, long enough for Sherlock to register what he's seeing, then transfers it to her dominant hand and hurls it at his head. Unfortunately, he is recovered enough that he simply catches it. No matter. She emptied it into the toilet already.

"Ah," says Sherlock, his expression going carefully, haughtily blank.

"You've got one hell of a nerve," she tells him, her voice cold.

" _Don't_ be tedious. I realize it is difficult, but you are capable of better when you make an effort."

"That's rich," she says. "Considering. Or have you never noticed that junkies are the most tedious, mundane, _boring_ people on _the fucking planet._ "

Sherlock's eyes narrow, and from the glint in them Joanna can tell that she has not only scored a hit, but that Sherlock is actually thinking about what she said, as though she has presented him with new data. Possibly she is the only person who has ever dared to call him boring.

"That's all?" he says, arching a dark eyebrow. "I would have expected an appeal based on scientific fact, drawn from your medical expertise."

"There's no point _appealing_ to you. If you gave a damn how I felt you never would have bought the stuff. I'm telling you, as your flatmate, I won't tolerate it."

"Or what?" Sherlock sneers. "You'll move out? As if you would."

"Why should I do that? This flat suits me. It might suit me even better with a different flatmate. I expect there'll be a vacancy, when Lestrade brings you up on charges."

"Unimaginative." Sherlock rolls his eyes and executes a dramatic half-spin, tumbling back onto the sofa. The collar of his shirt gapes, and his arm dangles languidly off the edge of the cushions, like a poet in an opium-dream. " _Dull._ You won't report me to Lestrade, any more than you'll leave. Your heart can't really be in this if you can't be bothered to come up with a more plausible threat."

Joanna stands there, her fists clenched at her sides. If there weren't something more at stake here than just warning Sherlock off drugs, she would press the question of why he's so bloody confident that she won't do anything to permanently upset the status quo of their lives. Because he's right. They've never discussed it, but she needs Sherlock, maybe more than he needs her. But the fact that he knows this, and considers it license to do whatever he damn well pleases, is intolerable. It isn't as though she doesn't have limits.

It isn't as though needing him make her _weak._

"Five years ago, you over-dosed," she says, folding her arms. Her voice is perfectly steady, and so, she is pleased to notice, are her hands. "Your brother hushed that up and got you sober again. I can just imagine what someone with his resources would do if he knew you were using again. After all, he worries about you."

Joanna's rather proud of the way she manages the tone of that last bit--insinuating, and just a bit snide, worthy of a certain genius she knows. Two of them, actually. And she's proud of the threat itself, because oh yes, _that_ one is perfectly plausible. Sherlock knows Mycroft would listen to her. Mycroft seems to like her, unnervingly enough, and to regard her as a fellow specialist in the highly esoteric field of Sherlock-management. More importantly, whatever he did to Sherlock in the name of getting him clean would be less damaging and irreversible than having him arrested for possession, though Sherlock would undoubtedly find it ten times more infuriating.

Yes, Joanna would bloody well take tea with Mycroft Holmes, if it meant keeping Sherlock alive and in her life. Sherlock knows it, too.

Which is why he comes up off the sofa in a whirlwind of long limbs and floating dressing gown and advances on her so fast that Joanna, acting on an instinct much older than her military training, finds herself backing away from him. Sherlock bears down on her until she is literally up against the wall, and then he stands there, _looming_ over her with all his ridiculous height, like some kind of bloody vampire.

He leans down, until there are only inches between them, and stares into her face. His pale eyes are dark with anger and other emotions too complexly layered for Joanna to suss out. Joanna is keenly aware that Sherlock is, very carefully and very specifically, _not_ touching her, in a way that draws inescapable attention to the fact that if he chose to make this a contest of strength, rather than will, most of the advantage would be on his side.

Joanna's heart is pounding, because people don't _do_ this sort of thing unless they're either going to fight, or fuck, and not only can't she tell which Sherlock has in mind, but her own thoughts are caught between making a tactical assessment of his weaknesses, and wondering whether, if she touched him now, he would melt, or else ignite like one of his experiments gone awry.

There's only one thing she knows for certain. The static in her head is gone, replaced by the clarifying thrum of adrenaline, and yes, _this_ is why she needs him, because one way or another Sherlock always makes things _happen._

Joanna lifts a hand slowly, telegraphing her movements, and rests her fingers lightly against the delicate skin of Sherlock's pale throat. It is a deliberately feminine gesture that doesn't come naturally to her, and it only works if a man is subtle enough to hear the whispered message: It doesn't matter that he's stronger than her, because they both know he can't get what he wants by force.

She holds her breath. Sherlock's own breathing staggers, then stops. For a second, his eyes flutter shut.

Joanna keeps her hand at his throat. With the other, she reaches unerringly for the sensitive spot under his left arm, and tickles him.

Sherlock sputters a laugh like a scream and flails backwards, seeming to levitate for a moment, like a cat dropped into water. Joanna advances on him with her hands out, fingers bent in tickle position, and Sherlock wraps his dressing ground around his torso like armor, glaring at her with a distinctly feline look of outraged indignation.

Joanna smiles, triumphantly. Like a girl in a fairy tale, she's broken the spell, and Sherlock is once again a mad, brilliant, sputtering _child,_ and oh, she could laugh. Life is going to be very good now, at least for a little while.

"Try that again and I'll have your balls in a knot," she tells him happily. "I can do it, too. The RAMC have a special course."

Sherlock huffs, and mutters something under his breath.

"I'm going to make tea," she says. Her left hand gives a distinct throb, and she glances down at her sore knuckles. "And to get a plaster. Then you can tell me about the case."

*

"I received an e-mail this afternoon from a man with the improbable name of Hilton Cubitt," Sherlock calls to her from the sitting room, while Joanna checks the kettle for contaminants. "He believes someone is threatening his wife."

"Believes?" says Joanna, fishing the tea tin from the cupboard bearing the notice, _FOOD ONLY, ANY CHEMICAL OR BIOLOGICAL SAMPLES WILL BE BINNED!!_ "If he's her husband, shouldn't he know for certain? And why didn't the wife email you, if she's the one being threatened?"

"That's what makes this a case worth pursuing, instead of just another tedious instance of stalking via post. The wife is receiving messages encoded in a pictographic cypher. I've never seen anything like it, it's _brilliant._ "

Joanna pauses in the act of retrieving the tea cups. She thinks of the letters locked in her office, and flushes. "If you don't know what it says, how do you know they're threats? Maybe it's a prank."

"I asked Mr Cubitt the same thing. But the wife is apparently terrified. She wants them to leave the country."

"She knows the cypher, then."

"Apparently."

"Am I missing something? Why doesn't Mr Cubitt just ask her about them?"

Joanna carries the tea into the sitting room. Sherlock is sitting at the desk, working at his laptop. She places a cup next to his elbow, sits down in the armchair.

"She won't talk about them," says Sherlock, eyes fixed on the computer screen. "Her name's Elsie Patrick. She's 23, American, from Chicago. She met her husband a year ago, while she was at university. She took her degree shortly after they married and moved with him to Derbyshire. When they met, she told him that she came to England to forget her past, and made him promise never to ask her about her background. So either she was involved in something criminal, and now she's being blackmailed, or she came here to flee a bad relationship, and her boyfriend has found her. Look at this."

Sherlock turns the laptop around, and Joanna blinks at the image.

"It's a child's drawing," she says.

Sherlock rolls his eyes. "Don't be stupid. The marks are _precise,_ they're _patterned_. It's clearly some sort of code."

"You're sure? Does she have kids?"

"No. Or at least, none with her current husband."

"That's an idea, then. Maybe she has kids who are still in America, and she had to leave them when she left their father. He sends her some of their drawings, she gets upset because not only has he tracked her down, he's flaunting the fact that he has control of the children. Classic pattern in domestic abuse."

Sherlock shakes his head. "Doesn't fit. Why not send her a photograph of the children? Show her how much they've grown, how much time she's lost with them? No, this is a message, for her alone. Doesn't matter who else sees it, she's the only one who can read it, so if she goes to the police she's only got her words they're threats. Even if she identifies the man who's threatening her, he can deny everything. Oh, he is _clever._ " There is a small, satisfied smile at the corners of Sherlock's mouth.

Joanna picks up her tea and frowns into it, thoughtful. She hears the rapid clicking of Sherlock's fingers, flying over the keyboard. After a few seconds of silence, he looks over at her, stops, and sighs. "What's wrong?" he says, his tone already slightly bored.

Joanna takes a breath, and sets her mug down. Sherlock is going to have a tantrum, she's almost certain, but she has to say it. "I'm not certain we should be investigating this."

"What?" Sherlock looks baffled. "Joanna, this is _perfect_."

It's Joanna's turn to roll her eyes. "I don't mean because it's not interesting enough." _You complete wanker,_ she doesn't add. "If Elsie Patrick knows who's sending her the notes, and why, then there isn't really a mystery, is there? She told her husband she doesn't want to talk about it. If he's that desperate to know, he ought to be trying to persuade her to tell him, not hiring a detective to pry it out of her." She winces. "Reminds me of that creepy bloke from your other case who kept hiring that bicycle messenger to protect her from his friend who was stalking her. Instead of, you know, just _telling_ her some arsehole wanted to lock her up in his attic."

Sherlock looks at her for a few second, seemingly uncertain, as though he's trying to read some hidden meaning into her words from the pattern of her eye-blinks. Then he looks back at the computer. "Irrelevant," he says. "The messenger girl was the client in that case. Hilton Cubitt, not Elsie Patrick, is our client now."

Joanna refuses to let herself be distracted from the many, many things that are simply _wrong_ with that statement by Sherlock's use of _our._ "So you're saying there's no such thing as a case that would be wrong for you to take, only cases that are too boring?" she says.

"Oh, god, don't start," mutters Sherlock, somehow irritated and completely distracted at the same time.

"No, really, I'd like to know," says Joanna, ignoring the danger signal at the back of her mind that warned her she angry enough to say something foolish. You had to disregard that signal when you lived with Sherlock, because it went off every damn day. "If someone wanted your help stalking me and made an interesting case for it, would you do it?

"Unlikely. I can't think of anything more boring than investigating someone I already know everything about." Sherlock rises abruptly from his chair while Joanna gapes, outraged. "I'm going out, I need to see if Lestrade has American contacts who can get me Elsie Patrick's criminal records from Chicago. He's out having a pint. Several, by now, if I'm lucky. Don't wait up. Our trains leave at eight tomorrow morning."

"What? What train?"

"Derbyshire!" says Sherlock, then sweeps out the door.


	3. Chapter 3

3.

In the privacy of Joanna's head, which is slightly less private than it used to be, now she lives with Sherlock, all the events surrounding Moriarty's attempt to kill her are filed neatly under the general heading of, "The Exploding Pool Incident," which would be a cracking good title for a blog post, if she ever writes that case up (she won't).

Joanna feels that _not_ being caught in poolside explosions is something she took for granted before the Incident, so she always makes a point of referring to it, mentally, in capitals, in the hopes she will never need to qualify it as "The _First_ Exploding Pool Incident" or "The Exploding Pool Incident In Which None Of My Friends Died (As Opposed To A Later One That Finished Several Of Them Off)".

The weeks following the Incident had been rather hard on Joanna, although you would have to flip a coin to decide who had been more miserable, her or Sherlock. For Joanna, there had been nearly a month of unutterably dreary idleness as her body knit itself back together, peppered with entertaining flashbacks to all the other times she'd been blown up. For Sherlock, there had been the tedium of nursing her, a task he refused to relinquish to an outsider despite Mycroft's offers of assistance, combined with the new and uncomfortable experience of feeling guilty for nearly getting them both killed. On top of _that_ , he had to live with the humiliation of owing their lives to Sally Donovan, who'd been the first officer to arrive on the scene, and had dragged them both out from under the rubble single-handedly, swearing at Sherlock all the while. The next case they worked for Lestrade after Joanna's recovery, Sherlock had kissed Sally on the cheek, and thanked her so effusively that she was completely unnerved, and has hardly spoken to either of them since.

"See if she ever saves our lives again," Joanna had chided Sherlock, who had given her a round-eyed look of sincere bafflement, then dropped it and grinned like a dog.

All of this aside, the one undeniable lesson she had learned from the Incident (apart from "all men who wear bespoke tailoring are creepy on some level or another") was that Sherlock is well and truly human: capable of making mistakes, and capable of enormous depth of feeling, though he works very hard to hide both those things. Once that realization had dawned, she wondered how she could have failed to see the signs before. Genius is fragile, and functions by its own rules. If Sherlock felt less, perhaps he could afford for feeling to intrude on his work more. But the greater the tragedy that had befallen the victims in his cases, the more heartless he seemed, because there was no shortage of useless people who could give them sympathy, and only one person who could give them justice.

Which isn't to say that Sherlock is some sort of martyr, heroically repressing his passions in the service of a higher cause. In some ways he is really rather childish, as though at a crucial stage in his development he was so busy nourishing his abilities that he missed some rather important lessons about how people work. But Joanna went to medical school; she's met geniuses before, and she knows that a certain degree of social dysfunction is more common than not in people who are really gifted. She understands this for what it is, and no longer worries about Sherlock's morals. She'd only been trying to get a rise out of him, when she accused him of only caring whether a case was interesting. She knows that, in Sherlock's eyes, Elsie Patrick's privacy is far less important than stopping the person threatening her. Joanna could hardly disagree. She just hopes Hilton Cubitt is really a loving husband who's out of his mind with worry, and not a controlling areshole who thinks he knows better than his wife what's good for her.

There are plenty of supposedly good people who stand about saying all the correct things, but rather fewer people who actually do anything to make the world a better place. By that standard, Sherlock is probably the most moral person she knows.

Whenever Joanna feels compelled to look, really _look_ at her life and wonder what she's about, self-medicating her dysphoria and depression and post-traumatic stress with adrenaline, she always comes back to that. Sherlock makes the world a better place, and Joanna helps him. People join the army for less noble reasons every day, and she was a soldier long enough to know that no one becomes a hero on purpose. People blunder into heroism while they're searching for something else, and along the way, they sometimes blunder into other things. Like cocaine, and allowing themselves to be stalked because it's more fun than being bored.

Christ, but she and Sherlock really are a matched set. It would be funny, if it weren't so bloody sad.

*

As soon as they board the train for Derbyshire the next morning, Sherlock collapses. He didn't sleep last night, she's sure, and she doubts he slept much in the days prior, when he was playing at living rough. It worries her, how freely he spends himself, like he thinks there's no end to him, or (more likely, and more worryingly) he simply doesn't care how fast he uses himself up. But she understands; that's always the worst of it, that she can never take him to task properly, because she understands him so well. It's not as though Sherlock is ever going to retire, not when he needs the work just to keep from clawing his way out of his own skin. And what's the point of his being alive if he can't work as he's accustomed to, which is to say, flat out?

Joanna can hardly lecture him on the virtues of self-preservation when she knows, deep down, how unlikely she is to see 40.

"Must you _think_ so loudly," mutters Sherlock, from beneath the newspaper he's draped over his head. He's slouched against the back of the seat, not resting so much as attempting to switch off his body and divert the flow of blood and energy to his brain. Really, he may not be a doctor, but anyone who knows as much about the human body as Sherlock should know they don't work like that.

"Sorry," she says. "Didn't realize you'd come over telepathic this morning. Bit of a shock, was it?"

"Telepathy would be overkill. Anyone could see by the deepening of the furrows in your brow that you're fretting over something."

"You're not actually looking at my brow. Or at anything."

Sherlock lifts a pale, long-fingered hand and snatches the newspaper off his face, crumpling it up and lobbing it into the corner of the compartment. He turns his head to look at her.

"What is it?" He sounds bored, like he always does when he asks that question.

"Nothing."

"Don't be tiresome."

Joanna heaves a sigh. "I worry about you sometimes."

"Oh, God." He looks up at the ceiling. "You and Mycroft should form a society. Or marry. God, no, forget I said that."

"Why?" says Joanna, amused. "It's an idea. I like Mycroft." It isn't a complete lie.

"He can't have you. I found you first." He snorts. "Anyway, he's far more likely to try to bribe you into marrying me."

"Why would he bother? You said yourself, I'm not going anywhere."

She means it for a joke, but Sherlock grows rather more still than he was a second before. An odd, tense moment passes, both of them not looking at each other, then Sherlock stirs and takes his mobile from his coat pocket.

"I'm close to cracking the cypher," he says. "First word of each message is the same. Four letters. The woman's name, Elsie. It's good, it gives us 'e', most common letter in English. And the figure holding flags, they'll denote word endings. So a healthy sprinkling of e's, s's, and i's, and the knowledge that the language is probably threatening. Words begin to reveal themselves. I've filled in some of the blanks, see if you can make out any of the rest." He thrusts a small, ragged notebook with a spiral binding under her nose.

Joanna takes it and studies the assortment of letters interspersed with blanks, like a game of hangman. She's never been particularly good at this sort of thing--doesn't even care for the crossword much. But she thinks about threatening language, and finds herself remembering the sentiments expressed in the most recent letter she'd locked in her office filing cabinet. She spots a series of five blanks with an "i" in the middle, and the missing letters slot into place.

"This one with five letters is probably 'bitch'," she tells Sherlock. "Which means the three letter word in front is probably 'you'. Original, that."

Sherlock's eyes widen, and he grabs the book back, taking a pencil from behind his ear. "Which give us 'T' and two more vowels. Beautiful, Joanna," he mutters, low in his throat.

Joanna reddens, and turns away, smiling. She watches the landscape rush past the window for a few seconds. Then, into the silence, Sherlock says, "Oh." Joanna tenses automatically, looking round at him. She knows that "oh" of Sherlock's, and it never means anything good.

"What?" she says.

Sherlock is frowning down at the paper, scribbling furiously with his pencil as he fills in the new letters. Then he tosses the notebook to Joanna, who catches it by clapping her hands together. Sherlock takes out his phone and begins typing into the narrow keyboard. Joanna looks down at the paper, and her heart sinks.

 _TOD_Y IS THE D_Y YOU DIE,_ she reads in Shelock's precise block capitals.

"That was the most recent message," he says. "The timestamp on Cubitt's e-mail was 2:57 a.m."

"So today means _today_." Joanna looks up. "We need to call the police."

"Call Lestrade," says Sherlock, distractedly. "Tell him to call ahead and clear us with the locals. They won't believe us in time otherwise."

"What are you doing?" Joanna asks, already thumbing through her contacts. _Greg_ is reasonably near the top of the list.

"Searching local news reports," he mutters. "I hope I'm wrong, but if I'm not-- _damn!_ "

Joanna flinches, as Sherlock, white with rage, leaps to his feet and hurls his phone into the same corner of the compartment where he'd thrown the crumpled newspaper earlier. It bounces from the wall to the floor with a clatter. She looks at Sherlock, who spins on his heel and gives her his back, clenching his fingers in his wild hair. Joanna doesn't say anything, though her curiosity is as strong as her dread. Instead, she leans down and picks up the phone. Miraculously, it seems unharmed, apart from a few fresh scrapes. The website he'd been reading is still up on the screen. It's a news article, from a Derbyshire paper, posted half an hour ago.

WIFE SLAYS HUSBAND, SHOOTS SELF, reads the headline. Joanna skims just enough of the article to spot the names "Elsie Patrick" and "Hilton Cubitt."

"Oh, no," she says, in a whisper that is half sigh.

"I wasn't fast enough." Sherlock is still facing the door, the line of his shoulders tense. Joanna can hear the despondency in his voice, layered beneath the fury. "And now an entire battalion of provincial police who probably make Anderson look like an intellectual giant are no doubt in the process of destroying all the evidence."

"Sherlock." She knows it won't help, but she can't help trying to reason with him. "You've been on the case less than twelve hours, no one could expect you--"

"I had all the time I needed." He seems to have got his voice back under control, although he still doesn't turn around. "I miscalculated. I wasted time trying to unearth Elsie Patrick's background, when I ought to have focused entirely on cracking the cypher."

Joanna doesn't say anything. Sherlock stands there a few moments more, then turns and, deliberately, lowers himself back into the seat.

"Don't talk to me," he says. "I need to think."

This suits Joanna, who doesn't have the faintest idea what to say. But looking at Sherlock, it crosses her mind, not for the first time, that this work they need so badly has a rather high price, at times. Almost as high as the alternative.

She looks back out the window and slumps down into the bulk of her coat, trying not to think what they'll find when they reach the end of the line.


	4. Chapter 4

4.

Eventually, Joanna remembers that they still need to contact the police. Sherlock, sitting with his knees against his chest, his steepled fingers propped under his chin, is clearly miles away from thoughts of mundane, practical considerations, like making sure they don't get arrested when they attempt to examine the crime scene. Joanna doesn't feel much better than Sherlock looks, but she knows it'll have to be her who calls, or it won't get done. Sighing, she picks up her phone, where she'd dropped it on the seat next to her, and dials Lestrade.

"You're in luck," Lestrade tells her a few minutes later, after she's explained matters. She can hear his slow, two-fingered typing over the phone as he looks up the information she asked for. "Bloke in charge is a DI Martin. He'll probably work with you. Me and him had a case together awhile back, before Sherlock's time. We got on well enough. He sends me an email every once in a while."

"Good to hear," she says. "But what makes you so sure he'll work with Sherlock?"

Lestrade gives a short cough, not unlike a laugh. "I linked him to your blog," he tells her. "He's what you might call a fan."

"Oh," Joanna blinks. And, though it is entirely inappropriate under the circumstance, she blushes.

Lestrade puts her on hold while he talks to the Norwich constabulary on another line, arranging their access and no doubt vouching for them as well. She hopes they don't give him cause to regret it. She's rarely seen Sherlock so disturbed in the middle of an investigation, and what rudimentary social skills he possesses go directly out the window when he's in emotional turmoil. She wonders, suddenly, whether the Yarders who suspect Sherlock of lacking all human feeling would like him any better if they knew that the more he cared, the ruder he became. She suspects not.

"The police are meeting our train," she tells Sherlock after Lestrade rings off. Sherlock gives no sign that he's heard her, though he was undoubtedly listening to every word of her side of the phone call. "We're to work with a DI Martin, from Norwich. He knows about you through Lestrade." She doesn't think she should mention her blog to Sherlock just now.

They sit in silence for the last half hour of the train ride. When the train comes to a halt, and they step onto the platform, a constable is waiting for them.

"Joanna Watson," says Joanna, introducing herself. "And this is Sherlock Holmes."

"PC Shakanti," she says. "I'm to take you to the house, DI Martin is expecting you."

Joanna half expects Sherlock to rebel at the prospect of riding in the back of a police car, but to her surprise he allows himself to be led to the black and white cruiser and ducks inside without a word of protest. Joanna gets in beside him and fastens her seat belt.

"Can you tell us anything about the crime scene?" she says to the constable.

"Looks like a straightforward case of murder and attempted suicide," says PC Shakanti, nudging the car into the line of traffic.

" _Attempted_ suicide?" Joanna glances at Sherlock, whose chin jerks up, his eyes widening. "So Elsie Patrick is still alive?"

"Alive and in a coma," says the constable. "People think guns are foolproof, but it's a mistake, shooting yourself in the head with a small calibre bullet. She'd have died anyway, if the neighbors hadn't found her only a few minutes after." She shakes her head. "Horrible business."

Sherlock looks at Joanna. Their eyes meet, just long enough for Joanna to register the simultaneous relief and repulsion in Sherlock's expression. Joanna looks away, and tries not to think about the gun in her bedside drawer, the oblivion it had seemed to promise when oblivion seemed the only thing that could cure her. She can't imagine anything worse than shooting herself and _not dying._ She'll have to rethink her plans, the next time she feels--god, what she is thinking? It's obscene, under the circumstances.

She makes certain not to look at Sherlock again until they're out of the car.

It's only a ten minute drive from the train station to the small gated community on the outskirts of North Walsham where Hilton Cubitt and Elsie Patrick had lived. They spot the house from the bottom of the hill, surrounded as it is by police cruisers and milling uniformed officers. PC Shakanti parks the car at the back of the crush, and alights swiftly enough to intercept Sherlock, who is already striding toward the garden gate. Wordlessly, she falls into place ahead of him, leading him onwards, and Joanna trails a foot or so behind.

"Sir, the consultants from London," says PC Shakanti, before evaporating into the crowd of uniforms.

A short, balding man, only an inch or so taller than Joanna, turns and beams at them from the front steps. He mutters something aside to a constable with a notepad in his hand, and the constable disappears ito the crowd after PC Shakanti, leaving Joanna and Sherlock alone with his superior.

"Detective Inspector Phillip Martin," he says, surprising Joanna by offering his hand to her first. She is rather more surprised by the fact that when he turns and holds his hand out to Sherlock, Sherlock accepts it. "It's an honor to have you here. I must say, I'm rather an admirer of your work, Mr Holmes. And of your writing, Doctor Watson."

"Oh, um, thanks," says Joanna.

"I need to see the crime scene," says Sherlock. Joanna takes it as a further sign of his preoccupation that he lets the mention of her writing pass without a scathing comment of some sort, though the peremptory manner of his demands is perfectly in character. She tenses, out of habit, afraid that Martin will react badly, but Martin merely shakes his head.

"Of course," he says. "This way."

He leads them through the front door, past the foyer, into to a kitchen situated on the left side of the house. Joanna can smell the faint traces of gunpowder still, which means Sherlock must be able to smell it too. There are two large puddles of blood on the floor, one of them smeared, the other having spread from beneath the body of the man lying n the floor beneath the window. Joanna approaches, reluctantly, for a close look. He's about 35 years old, with ginger hair and pale overbred English features, not unlike Sherlock's. The second pool of blood, no doubt belonging to Elsie Patrick, is several feet away, nearer to the door. A small, antique pistol, a WWII era Browning, sits on the kitchen table, enclosed in an evidence bag.

"We found the gun under the china cupboard, where it fell from Elsie Patrick's hand. Four bullets chambered, plus the one in Mr Cubitt and the one in Ms Patrick. All accounted for."

Martin speaks from so close behind Joanna that she jumps a little at the sound of his voice. She turns to look at him and he smiles, apologetically. "Really, Dr Watson," he says, "I'm delighted you're here, but this hardly seems like a case that deserves your attention. They clearly argued, then she became angry and shot him, only to realize what she'd let herself in for and shoot herself. Probably all done in the heat of a moment. You know what Americans are, where guns are concerned."

"Yes, they all receive weapons training at school and go about perpetually armed thereafter," mutters Sherlock. She wonders if Martin hears the note of contempt in his voice. "What did you do with the notes?"

"Notes?" says Martin, brows slanting downwards in his round face.

"Someone has been sending threatening letters to Elsie Patrick, encoded in a cypher that resembles a child's drawing. The last one was a death threat. There will be records in Mr Cubitt's phone, and the physical evidence should be somewhere in this house." Sherlock looks at Martin's expression of blank incomprehension and rolls his eyes. "Oh, spare me. You did search the house, didn't you?"

"Of course, but--"

"I need to talk to the scene of crime officer."

Sherlock doesn't wait for Martin to direct him, choosing instead to simply sweep from the room. Martin watches him go, gaping, then shakes his head and looks at Joanna with a chuckle.

"He's everything you described him as, and more," says Martin. "But I suppose he gets results, doesn't he, Dr Watson? Still, you must find him rather a trial to work with at times."

"What? Oh, you know." Joanna smiles. "Will you excuse me, I just need to--"

She ducks around Martin and follows Sherlock deeper into the house.

*

When none of the investigating officers produce evidence of the dancing men, Sherlock conducts his own search of the Cubitt-Patrick home, only to come up empty-handed. He doesn't find a single threatening note, cyphered or otherwise, and if not for the fact that he is able to show DI Martin the photographs Cubitt emailed him, Joanna suspects that Martin would have remained politely skeptical of their existence. He takes Sherlock's phone and peers at the displayed images with arched eyebrows, shaking his head in a confession of utter bafflement.

"And you say you can read them? Mm." He gives Sherlock and Joanna a look of frank admiration, passing the phone back to Sherlock. "I'd appreciate it if you would forward those emails to me. The translations as well."

"Of course," says Joanna, glaring at Sherlock when he fails to respond.

"Are you returning to London, or do you intend to stay in town?"

"I'm not going anywhere," Sherlock mutters, to Joanna's amazement.

"Then if you'd like to come by first thing tomorrow morning, perhaps we can put our heads together. I'll notify you at once if anything new turns up. PC Shakanti will be along in a moment to take you back into town."

DI Martin looks from Sherlock's distant, shuttered expression, to Joanna. He shakes her hand and gives her his card, with a small wink, then tips the brim of an invisible hat to Sherlock and walks away. Joanna looks down at the card in her hand and sees that he's written his home number below his office and mobile numbers--and beside it, as if to make certain she'll catch on, he's drawn a little smiley face.

"Oh, for God's sake," she mutters.

"He gave you his number," says Sherlock, his tone distracted. "I knew he would."

"Oh, you deduced that, did you?"

"It was obvious that he fancied you. I believe an exchange of phone numbers is customarily the next step."

"We did not exchange phone numbers," Joanna snaps at him. "I only gave him your mobile."

Sherlock looks at her and smiles, seeming fully present in his own face for the first time since the train ride. "Then it seems DI Martin is in for a disappointing surprise."

Joanna shifts the subject aside, impatient. "Are we really staying here tonight?"

Sherlock's expression becomes closed off again, his nostrils flaring, his mouth pressed into a thin line. "I am in the middle of a case, Joanna, and no nearer to solving it than I was this morning. Where else would I be?"

Joanna looks up at his face. His gaunt features are positively haggard with sleeplessness. His pale eyes are hard and bright, a ruthless, determined set to them. He'll never admit to it, she realizes, but Sherlock blames himself for what happened in the house behind them. A man had come to him for help, and died before Sherlock could stop it, and to Sherlock this is intolerable.

If Sherlock were anyone else, he would simply say the words. _My client is dead and I can't help feeling responsible._ And then Joanna could say, _It's not your fault._ But it isn't logical to feel guilty, and Sherlock will never admit to being illogical. Nor would he ever allow himself to be comforted by Joanna pointing out the obvious.

 _Sod it_ , she thinks, and reaches out to cover his gloved hand with her bare one. "It isn't your fault."

She expects Sherlock to give her a look of withering scorn and say something rude. Instead, he looks down at her hand for a long moment, and his expression, briefly, seems to grow rather soft.

"Your hands are freezing," he says finally. "Honestly, Joanna, you're not living on an Army pension anymore, you can afford a pair of decent gloves."

Joanna is saved from having to reply to this with more than a roll of her eyes by PC Shakanti, who pulls the car up next to the curb a second later.

*

When they reach the hotel, Sherlock walks right past the door to his own room and follows Joanna into hers. He tumbles backwards onto the bed and assumes his favorite thinking posture, and Joanna leaves him to it. She plans to take a shower, having woken up too late for one before catching the train that morning. First, though, she has to call into the clinic and let Sarah know she'll be missing work tomorrow. She isn't looking forward to that conversation, though at least she's got two solid weeks of working double shifts behind her to make her feel less guilty than she normally does when Sherlock drives a cart and horses through her work schedule. She decides to put it off by dialing into her office voicemail and checking her messages first.

Unusually, there's only one message, from a number she doesn't recognize, though this is normal for work. And though she doesn't recognize the voice either, the content of the message is suddenly, startlingly familiar.

 _I have enjoyed our correspondence,_ rasps the man in a low whisper, obviously meant to disguise his voice. _But I think it's time we should meet, don't you?_

Joanna, despite herself, shudders, and disconnects the call.

"What's wrong?" says Sherlock. She looks over her shoulder and stares down at him. He hasn't so much as opened his eyes.

"Nothing," she says, dropping her phone into her pocket. She'll have to be careful to keep her phone with her, in an inner pocket, in case Sherlock's curiosity gets the better of him and he stoops to pick-pocketing her. Again. "I'm having a shower. Don't bother me till I'm dressed unless the room is on fire, got it?"

Sherlock waves a hand in dismissal. Joanna locks herself in the bathroom and turns on the water, then plants her hands on the sink and looks at herself in the mirror.

"This is getting out of hand, my girl," she tells herself quietly. Being an adrenaline junkie is one thing, but if she lets this go much longer it'll border on being completely irresponsible.

Joanna shucks off her clothes and steps into the water, wondering precisely how she's going to go about investigating behind Sherlock's back. Why it's so important to keep Sherlock out of it, she doesn't let herself think. She'd need longer than the hot water will last to puzzle that one out.


	5. Chapter 5

5.

An hour or so after Joanna finishes showering, a police constable arrives at the hotel with a packet of witness statements for Sherlock's perusal. They spend the rest of the evening ensconced at the small breakfast table in the corner of Joanna's room, examining the new data until ten o'clock, when Sherlock's eyes begin to cross of their own accord. It is, Joanna knows, a measure of how profoundly exhausted he is that Sherlock allows her to chivvy him to his own bed with only a token protest. They both sleep until ten the next day, and after a late breakfast they call a cab to take them to the local constabulary, where DI Martin receives them in his office. He smiles and greets them civilly, even enthusiastically, but he has no new information for them, and Sherlock curtly declines to discuss the case with him in any depth. Joanna, anxious to avoid the awkwardness of being alone with Martin after his failed come-on of the previous day, doesn't try to persuade Sherlock to be more cooperative. They leave shortly and make another trip to the Hilton-Patrick house, so that Sherlock can examine the garden without having to negotiate a crowd of constables. Afterwards, they return to town and walk the high street for a bit, before purchasing a take-away curry for dinner and returning to the hotel.

After they've finished eating, Joanna makes tea. Sherlock accepts the mug when she presses it into his hand, but sets it aside distractedly a moment later, his expression distant, thoughts trained inward.

"DI Martin believes that Elsie Cubitt quarreled with her husband, became incensed enough to murder him, and seconds later was so overwhelmed with remorse that she turned the gun on herself," he says, tapping the bundled witness statements with his forefinger. "Everyone who knew them is united in the opinion that they were an unhappy couple. The rowed continually, and the police visited them on average once every two months, in response to the complaints of their neighbors."

"Did anyone happen to know what they were rowing over?" says Joanna, lifting a photograph from the paper pile. It was a wedding portrait, the groom dressed formally in a morning suit. The bride, a sporty looking blonde girl with a frank, beaming smile, wears a sleek designer wedding dress that probably cost what Joanna made in a year. "Not over money, I should think."

"Hilton Cubitt wished to start a family, but his wife was devoted to her career, rather out of proportion to its significance. She's a data entry clerk for the Home Office. Not a very prestigious position for someone with Elsie Patrick's academic credentials, but she was young, and in the current state of the economy perhaps she was glad to take what she could get."

Joanna tries not to think about the future, or lack of it, that awaits the girl in the photograph now, lying in a hospital bed with her hair shaved and tubes sticking out of her. "You don't believe DI Martin's version of events, I assume?"

"Of course not. Martin thinks what he's meant to think, because he's an idiot." Joanna watches, bemused, as Sherlock sweeps the papers off the table and onto the floor, not in a fit of temper, but casually, like a man who doesn't hesitate to make messes because he grew up surrounded by people who were paid to tidy up for him. He leans his chair back and props his feet where the papers were, tilting his head back to stare at the ceiling.

"Do you know what sort of crime is more difficult to solve than any other?" Sherlock's tone is casual, thoughtful. He's thinking aloud, which means Joanna's role is simply to listen, skull-like. She sighs, quietly, and settles back in her chair, trying to look attentive.

"It isn't the highly original serial murder with bizarre ritualistic tendencies," he continues, without waiting for a response. "It's the perfunctory, unwitnessed stabbing of a boy in a back alley over a minor drugs deal gone wrong. It happens in an impoverished neighborhood where such deaths are so common that no one thinks to look out their window when they hear a cry in the night. The unsolvable crimes are dull, uncomplicated, the inevitable product of a venal society that sacrifices a statistically significant portion of its citizens to support its own cupidity."

Joanna blinks at him. "Sherlock," she says, "I think you just came dangerously close to having a political opinion."

Sherlock makes a scoffing noise, low in his throat, and waves his hand, as though to bat her words out of the air. "Certain crimes, however, are locks, for which I am the only key. I can stop a bad man from hurting others. I cannot stop human beings acting like human beings."

"And now you're getting philosophical," says Joanna, amused. "Are you feeling quite yourself? Was there something in the tea, do you think?"

Sherlock lifts his feet from the table and swings them onto the floor. The chair legs fall back to the carpet with a dull thud, and Sherlock springs up, beginning to pace back and forth across the small room.

"Hilton Cubitt and Elsie Patrick had a troubled marriage. He was twelve years older than her, traditional, frustrated because he wanted something she wouldn't give him. She was young, temperamental, and their rows were legendary. They might have killed each other without outside interference. DI Martin may be uninspired, but he is not illogical. Such things happen every day."

"But you said that isn't what happened."

"No, but the point is that it _might_ have. Someone arranged this, and they did it cleverly, but I can't think what the _point_ of it was. It's maddening. Why should anyone want Hilton Cubitt or Elsie Patrick dead? What possible purpose could there be in destroying their dull, ordinary lives?"

"Not all murderers can be connoisseurs," says Joanna mildly. "Some people get off on snuffing out a human life. Doesn't much matter what sort of life."

"But it doesn't fit," says Sherlock, reaching the end of the room and whirling back to face her. "There is genuine artistry at work here. This murderer is highly invested, highly motivated. Something inspired his _passion_. When I know what, I'll have him."

Joanna picks up her mug and frowns over the rim. "Where do you see artistry in this, exactly?"

"In the simplicity," says Sherlock. "Unnecessary elaboration distinguishes the amateur from the professional. Stupid, ordinary people who commit premeditated murder make predictable mistakes. They go about like it frustrated screenwriters plotting out the latest episode of a police drama on telly. They are always caught, because nothing is easier to solve than an elaborate murder--there are too many bits that stick out, like threads snagged from the weave of a cheap suit. The clever murderers are patient, watchful. They don't create artificial drama; they manipulate the drama already present. Our killer introduced a single, incendiary element to an already volatile mixture, then stepped back and waited for the explosion. And like an explosion, it neatly erased most of the evidence. He couldn't have foreseen that Mr Cubitt would pass the evidence of the dancing men on to me. If not for that, no one would have any reason to suppose that this was anything but an ordinary, petty domestic killing. It's just the murderer's bad luck that Mr Cubitt, whatever his failings, genuinely loved his wife and wished to help her."

Joanna sits silently, thoughts whirring as she sifts through Sherlock's uncharacteristically leisurely monologue for unspoken meaning. "So, you're saying--he knew their marriage was falling apart, so he began threatening Elsie Patrick because he knew it would drive her over the brink? Make her want to kill her husband? That--doesn't sound very reliable, does it? People aren't that easy to control. Stress can have completely the opposite effect, make them stronger, closer to the people they care about."

"Mm." Sherlock sits on the edge of the bed and folds his hands. "You're thinking like a soldier. Loyal to your section, over and above the drive for self-preservation. But what if one of your comrades betrayed you, betrayed your unit? Group loyalty and self-preservation would dictate the same course of action then, wouldn't they?"

"I suppose so," says Joanna, flatly. "It doesn't often happen, thank God."

"Perhaps not in the Royal Army Medical Corps. But in domestic warfare, it happens all the time." Sherlock springs from the bed and walks back to the table, where he shifts through the papers scattered on the floor with the toe of his shoe. "And what is a marriage, after all, but a loyal unit of two people, sworn to defend each other against all enemies?"

Sherlock snatches a single wrinkled sheet of paper from underneath the others and slides it across the table to Joanna. She takes it, with a palpable sense of trepidation. The paper is covered with Sherlock's tiny, precise writing.

"That is the complete set of the cypher translations I made for DI Martin," he says. "Thick as he is, even he should be able to see that they point to something far more complicated than a mere crime of passion."

Joanna's eyes widen as she reads the first paragraph of deciphered writing. She reads the second as well, and after that she merely skims them, feeling faintly sick. "My God," she breathes. "She thought _he_ wrote them. Her husband. These--these are horrible. No wonder she shot him, she must have been convinced he was going to kill _her_."

"Precisely." Sherlock studies her expression for a moment, and whatever he sees there causes him to extend one long arm and twitch the paper out of Joanna's unresisting fingers. "Which is why this is murder, and not simply harassment. Though unfortunately, as far as the police are considered, it will be a moral distinction, rather than a legal one."

"You don't suppose--" Joanna shifts uncomfortably. "You said the murderer was clever. It couldn't actually have been Hilton Cubitt, could it?"

Sherlock shakes his head once, an irritable twitch. "If he was intentionally trying to drive his wife mad, and also clever enough to deflect suspicion from himself by enlisting my help, he would have been more sensible of the risks. He knew about the gun; it belonged to his grandfather. He would have removed it from the house, or at the very least taken the bullets out."

Joanna isn't certain why, but she feels relieved that Sherlock is so sure.

"All right then," she says. "You're saying Elsie Patrick was driven to shoot her husband and herself by an unknown person for unknown motives. Fine. What I want to know is, why bring dancing men into it?" Joanna holds up her hand, to stave off the cutting remark that Sherlock is clearly about to make. "I know, I know, it was terribly clever of him to gaslight the poor woman by sending her threats she couldn't prove were threats. By why on earth would he suppose _she_ would ever be able to read them?"

The impatient look clears from Sherlock's face. He stares at the wall for a moment before answering.

"The cypher is fairly straightforward," he says. "Simple alphabetic substitution. Anyone possessed of half a brain could work it out eventually."

"So you think he came up with the code just on the off chance that she would bother putting the work in to crack it? That's--rather far-fetched, Sherlock."

Sherlock shrugs, and Joanna recognizes the twist at the corner of his mouth as a dissatisfied frown. "Perhaps." He scowls irritably and tugs his fingers through his hair. "I need more data."

"Did Lestrade come up with any American contacts who could look into her background?"

"It's a holiday weekend there, no one has responded yet." Sherlock straightens suddenly and turns to look at her. "You're going back to London in the morning."

"Yes," says Joanna, bracing herself for an argument. "I promised Sarah I'd take a late shift at the surgery."

"Good. Take the first train in the morning and pay a visit to University College London. It's only a year since Elsie Patrick was there, she'll have friends, professors who remember her. Ask questions, find out what she was interested in, who was interested in her."

"And where are you going?" demands Joanna, distracted from the orders she's just been issued by Sherlock's springing across the room to gather up his coat and laptop.

"To find a faster internet connection. The wi-fi in this hotel is intolerably slow."

He knots his scarf underneath his coat collar and strides from the room without a backward glance. Joanna is still gaping after him when the door opens again a moment later and Sherlock sticks his head back into the room.

"Forgot to mention," he says. He gives her the smirk Joanna has learned to dread more than his worst fits of temper. "DI Martin called, left a message for you. Wants to know if you'd like to have dinner this evening."

The bed is too far away for Joanna to reach a pillow in time, so she snatches up a biro from the table and chucks it straight at Sherlock's head. The door snicks shut just before the biro strikes it. Joanna can hear Sherlock's low, throaty laughter echoing from down the hall. "Berk," she mutters.


	6. Chapter 6

6.

Joanna arrives in London early the next morning. In defiance of Sherlock's orders, she heads first, not to University College London, but to Baker Street, having again foregone a morning shower in her rush to catch the earliest train. She hadn't slept particularly well the night before; her usual bad dreams, and the disturbing revelations about Elsie Patrick's recent history, had combined to make for a restless sort of night, and she's looking forward to melting the tension out of her clenched muscles with all the hot water the Victorian plumbing in their flat can offer.

She's on foot, more than halfway home from the tube station, when she notices that she's being followed. It's a testament to the utter insanity of Joanna's life that she is so used to this by now that she doesn't waste a second on denial, but skips straight to cataloguing all of Sherlock's known enemies, trying to decide which of them it's most likely to be.

Suddenly, a voice rasps from the back of her memory: _I think it's time we should meet, don't you?_

It takes everything Joanna's got not to shudder visibly and hunch down into her coat collar, but she does spare a moment to wonder why it's so much more disturbing to be followed for her own sake for once, instead of Sherlock's. Or the British army's, for that matter.

Joanna walks at a steady pace, watching the car behind her in the reflections of shop windows. She seeks the calm place inside herself where instinct and reason meet. She doubts she's in actual danger; there isn't much chance of anyone managing to kidnap her from a public street in broad daylight. Unfortunately, there's probably even less chance of successfully forcing a confrontation with a man who's following her in a car.

But--the thought comes to her with a small thrill, and she'd be lying to herself if she pretended it was nothing but fear--there _is_ a chance that he won't be able to pass up the chance of confronting _her,_ if she makes it easy for him.

Joanna waits until the car becomes ensnared in sluggish traffic close to a roundabout. Heart pounding in her ears, she pauses in the middle of the sidewalk, long enough for her pursuer to get a good look. She glances sideways at the coffee shop to her left, then checks her watch, trying to look like a busy woman who wonders whether she has time for a break in her morning schedule. Then she ducks inside, insinuates herself with lots of smiles and loud apologies to the front of the crowd, and buys a cup of plain black coffee.

She's sitting at a table facing the door, both hands wrapped around a paper cup and both eyes trained ahead, when Mycroft Holmes enters the shop three minutes later.

Joanna's mouth opens. Every muscle in her body goes rubbery in the sudden absence of tension. She shuts her eyes briefly, and indulges in a moment of profound self-disgust. Of _course_ it was bloody Mycroft following her in the _shiny black car,_ for God's sake. What on earth is wrong with her? Not even sleep deprivation can excuse that level of paranoid stupidity.

And to make matters worse, he is almost certainly reading every last bit of this in her face. Joanna takes a deep breath, in the hopes that it will steady her for the conversation ahead. When she opens her eyes again, she finds Mycroft standing behind the chair across from her.

"Good morning, Joanna." Mycroft's keen dark eyes flit across her face. She can practically hear the tell-tale synaptic clicks of a Holmesian brain fitting together the pieces of a puzzle. "You look surprised to see me."

"Hello, Mycroft." She sets her coffee down and gives him a level look. "You know, most spooks I know make a point of toning the spookiness down around their friends."

Mycroft arches an eyebrow, smiling faintly. "I am honored to hear that you think of me as friend."

"Not really the point I was trying to make."

Mycroft drums his fingers against the back of the chair. "May I join you?"

"If I say no, you can probably just conscript the chair into national service."

"You have fallen into Sherlock's habit of drastically over-estimating my influence. Restaurant chairs are entirely outside my remit." He leans his umbrella against the wall and draws the seat back, folding himself into it gracefully. "You look well, if slightly unsettled."

It isn't a question, but Joanna treats it like one. "I'm very well, thank you."

"And yet it would seem you've already had a long morning."

Joanna pointedly says nothing. She reaches for her coffee and takes a long sip. Mycroft may or may not be able to see right through her, but that doesn't mean she has to make it easy for him.

"I myself have had rather a long _week_ ," Mycroft continues. "I thought a chat, just between ourselves, might prove more---restful, than if I had waited for Sherlock's return."

"Oh? Did you need something?"

"Mm." Mycroft doesn't ignore the question, so much as set it aside momentarily. "If it isn't too forward of me, may I ask who you were expecting to walk through the door in my place?"

"I haven't the faintest idea," says Joanna, with perfect honesty.

"Trouble in connection with your current case?"

"Not at all."

"Unrelated to your case, then? Some private matter? You clearly haven't told Sherlock." Mycroft isn't precisely fidgeting in his chair, but for a second he grows very still indeed. "You are in some sort of trouble?"

"I wouldn't say so." Joanna looks from side to side, avoiding Mycroft's face. She is painfully conscious that Mycroft causes her to resurrect habits of body language she hasn't used since she left the army. As though Mycroft were her superior officer. In a roundabout way, he probably _is._ She doesn't want to think very hard about that.

"You know, one of the things I enjoy most about your company is that you really have no talent at all for lying." Mycroft looks reproving. "I don't wish to pry--"

"Then don't."

"--but I cannot help what I observe."

"Speaking of Sherlock's bad habits." She reaches for her coffee again. "I observe things myself from time to time. Doesn't mean I'm compelled to comment."

Mycroft merely continues to look at her with a school-teacherish expression of placid disapproval. "And yet I feel quite certain you have rarely noticed a person in distress without making some effort to assist them. That is your nature." Despite the fact that she hasn't seen him place an order, a waiter appears with a tiny espresso cup and places it on the table before him. Mycroft reaches for it. "I have no pretensions to your uniform generosity, but I do take an interest in your well-being."

Joanna opens her mouth.

"And not just for Sherlock's sake." He smiles widely at the consternation she knows she hasn't been able to keep from her face. "My job would be rather easier if there were more people like yourself in the world. I quite feel that losing you would be out of the national interest."

She's known practically from the beginning that Mycroft is devoted to his brother. It's why she likes him, despite the abundance of other reasons not to. But finding herself under Mycroft's shadowy wing is rather flooring, because she knows that he's not only _willing_ to move heaven and earth to safeguard his interests--he might actually be _capable_. She's both touched by the idea, and rather chilled by the implications.

"I'm not going anywhere," she says, conscious of having said the same thing to Sherlock not long ago.

"Good," says Mycroft brightly.

They sit in silence for a moment, and drink their coffee.

"So what did you want to chat about?" she says, hoping he will accept the change of subject.

"Ah, yes." Mycroft touches the tip of one finger to the rim of his saucer. "I understand Sherlock is inquiring into the death of a Mr Hilton Cubitt, of North Walsham. I have information that may assist the investigation."

"You looked into it for him?" Joanna can see why Mycroft hadn't wanted Sherlock present for this conversation. He would be livid.

"The matter came to my attention through my own channels," he says. "Elsie Patrick was--known to me."

"What, through the Home Office?" Joanna blinks. "Oh. You're about to tell me she wasn't actually a data entry clerk, aren't you?"

Mycroft's mouth quirks, as though in distaste. "A junior cryptanalyst, recruited out of university. A highly promising talent."

"What, but--she was American, wasn't she?"

"A British subject by birth, though I understand she concealed the fact in her personal life. Her family moved to the United States when she was a child, and her life there was unhappy. Troubled home, abusive parents. She cut ties when she returned to this country at the age of eighteen. In her chosen profession, such a lack of personal entanglement is no detriment. Rather the opposite."

"Like sending orphaned, unmarried soldiers on the dangerous missions in the war," Joanna mutters. "But she did marry?"

"Which was acceptable to her superiors, though it does tend to create unpleasant tensions in the relationship. Naturally, she was barred from telling her husband about her work."

"Naturally." Joanna frowns. "Someone was sending her threatening letters written in cypher. Was that--related to her work?"

"To my knowledge, the code used by her pursuer is not one employed by any domestic or foreign intelligence agency. It is rather too childishly simple, for purposes of international intrigue. A young woman of Ms Patrick's ability would have found that breaking it was the work of half an hour."

The faintly smug note in Mycroft's voice has Joanna narrowing her eyes. "How long did it take you?"

"Rather less than that." He tilts his chin downward, his expression serious. "I can only offer my conjecture, but I believe you will find that Elsie Patrick's service to the Crown is of far less relevance than the simple fact that she was very, very good at solving puzzles. This was no secret to her friends. Anyone who knew it might have used it against her, as her pursuer did." He gives Joanna a small smile, and looks directly into her eyes. "I have had occasion to observe before that at times our strengths can be as much a liability as our weaknesses."

Joanna stares back at him, caught in his gaze, until a discreet chime sounds from the vicinity of Mycroft's waistcoat pocket. His expression shifts to one of polite regret. "I fear I have come to the end of the leisure time allotted me this morning. But I trust you and Sherlock will find my information of some use."

Joanna nods automatically. "Yes, I'm sure." She stands up; Mycroft rises half a beat behind her. "Thank you. It was good of you to let us know." She doesn't go so far as to add, _I'm not sure why you bothered,_ but Mycroft, as usual, seems to pluck the thought straight out of her head.

"Elsie Patrick was under my aegis, however remotely," he says, in a strangely grim voice. "A person in my position relies on the loyalty of others. He cannot afford to forget that it must run both ways."

"Good," says Joanna. "That's--good."

Together, they walk to the cafe entrance. Mycroft opens the door for her and steps aside to let her pass.

"Thank you for your company, Joanna," he says. "May I take you to Baker Street?"

"Oh, no, thanks. I'll walk."

Mycroft studies her for a moment. Then he looks past her, up the street and down again, before turning toward the car that is parked, quite illegally, on the curb behind them.

"If you need anything," he says, as he walks away, "do remember that you have my number."

Joanna watches him for a moment, then shoves her hands into her coat pockets and strides off toward home. As she walks, she thinks that she's called in airstrikes with less trepidation than she would feel in calling Mycroft Holmes for any sort of help.


	7. Chapter 7

7.

On her way to the flat, Joanna thinks about how to word her text to Sherlock. Any mention of Mycroft is likely to send him into a fit of apoplectic fury, but she really doesn't see how she can avoid the subject indefinitely. She decides that she might as well let Sherlock work the inevitable tantrum out of his system while he's miles away. If nothing else, it will spare their already untidy sitting room a further thrashing.

_Spoke to Mycroft. EP was confidential cryptanalyst, worked for him. Stalker knew? Notes in cypher calculated to catch her interest?_

A reply comes less than a minute later, but Joanna purposefully doesn't look at it until after she reaches the flat and has her shower, just in case Sherlock wants her to do something she doesn't feel like doing before her hair is clean again.

For once, though, she is pleasantly surprised; there is only one message, and it says, _Mycroft is an interfering prat but he has his uses._

Joanna texts back. _Still want me to go to UCL?_

Sherlock doesn't reply immediately. Joanna glares at the phone in annoyance. She has to be at the surgery in two hours, and while she's perfectly happy to hang about the flat while her hair dries, she's not going to have time to do much investigating if she doesn't leave soon. She's just decided to settle in and have a cup of tea when her phone rings--actually rings. She snatches it up and stares at the display. It's Sherlock. Sherlock never phones if he can text.

"Did the keyboard on your phone break?" she says, in lieu of a hello.

"Mycroft e-mailed me Elsie Patrick's university transcript." Sherlock's voice is tense. "She sat a criminology course in her final term. The instructor was a one-term guest lecturer with whom she was known to have friendly relations outside of class."

"Who was the lecturer?" says Joanna, because this is obviously the question she is supposed to ask.

"Detective Inspector Philip Martin," he intones. "Norwich CID." There is something less of glee in his tone than she ordinarily would have expected.

Joanna stares down at the kettle, half full of water. She blinks, then turns off the tap, sets the kettle aside, and sinks into the chair behind her. "It could be coincidence."

The inarticulate note of derision in Sherlock's voice puts paid to that theory immediate.y

"But you said the murderer was clever," Joanna protests, "and that Martin was an idiot."

"Clever people know how to look like idiots when it suits their purposes."

Joanna takes a deep breath. "I suppose that's true. God. You're saying--you're sure it's him, then?"

"I made discreet inquiries. Martin pulled strings to be assigned this case. At best he is in violation of protocol, at worst he is reliving his crime and covering his tracks."

"That's cracked." Joanna rubs a face over her hand. "But it makes sense, the murderer would want to control the investigation if he could. What are you going to do?"

"I've had to put Mycroft on it. I can't risk walking into Norwich CID and informing Martin's superiors without tipping him off. Mycroft's people can secure him until the police have been talked round, assuming my brother doesn't simply deal with Martin himself He may do. He's in a mood."

"What, aren't you? This entire case has been--God." Joanna searches for the appropriate, all-encompassing expression. "He was _hitting_ on me," she points out, suddenly appalled.

There's a long silence on Sherlock's end. When he speaks again, his voice has gone positively brittle. "You're of a similar physical type to Elsie Patrick," he says. "I should have observed that."

Joanna shuts her eyes, willing to be silent on that be subject. "It's not important," says Joanna. Mostly because she doesn't want to think of the ways in which it might have become important, if the connection had gone undiscovered much longer. "Listen, I have to be at the surgery in a bit. Are you coming home tonight, or do you need me there?"

"I'm going once this lot's sorted. A few hours probably. I'll text when it's done."

Sherlock ends the call. Joanna sits with the phone in her hand a few minutes longer. Then she forces herself to stand up, make her tea, and drink it, before she gets dressed for work.

It's not that she won't be glad to see Sherlock when he gets home, but just at the moment she's gladder still that it'll be just her and Sarah working the surgery tonight. She's off the company of men, for a bit. The next creepy bloke to give her lip is likely to end up with speculum jammed up his arse, in a distinctly non-medical capacity. Sarah, at least, is more likely to back her up on the paperwork than a male boss might be.

*

At half four, Joanna hails a cab to take her into work. She's in the mood, for once, to enjoy a nice, relaxing, perfectly normal taxi ride. when she receives a text from Sherlock that is turns everything _but_ the taxi ride on its head.

_Martin slipped his lead, Sherlock says, Didn't report for work this morning. Tracing likeliest travel routes._

Joanna resists the urge to claw her nails across the upholstery. _Where's the betting pool say he's at, and at what odds?_ she replies.

_This is no time to support your unsavory habits, Joanna. Whereabouts remain uncertain. You haven't blogged this one, have you?_

_Piss off. I never write about a case until it's over with. Probably he knew the game was up the moment you came in, and decided to scarper sooner rather than later._

_Yes, thanks to your writing my scientific exercises look like romantic fiction. Martin, no doubt, believes I swan about in a cape in the off hours, and fly, bat-like, when threatened._

_And again, piss off,_ Joanna replies, amused, despite herself. _Did you consider he might be stalking multiple victims, and now he's seeing about the next one, before he gets taken in?_

_Well spotted, that is not at all unlikely. Damn your work ethic, you should be here. The incompetence of the locals is more than flesh can bear._

_Never fear, Mycroft's ninja's will swoop in any minute._

_They do not swoop. They arrive singly, like ants a picnic, and then they swarm. Too subtle for my tastes._

Joanna smiles, practically able to hear the peevishness in his tone. She takes it as a sign that things are merely tedious, rather than grim, a strain on Sherlock's boredom threshold rather than on his nerve.

 _Going in to work,_ she says, as the cab nears its stop. _Keep me posted._

The reply comes immediately. _Martin's last seen traveling toward London. Keep alert, bring usual reinforcements._

If Sherlock had been paying any attention at all, he'd know that Joanna has gone armed whenever she left the flat for days. Warning or not, she wasn't about to start taking chances now.

*

Joanna has the cabbie let her off about a block from the surgery. Operating on instincts that are firing more rapidly than reason, she walks to the back entrance, the one only she and Sarah have got keys for.

Since the moment Sherlock texted her about Martin's escape, an idea has been stirring at the back of Joanna's head. It's less a warning than an air raid siren, impelling her to rapid, decisive action.

She's entertaining an idea, almost against her will, and it's horrible--monstrous, over-blown, like something from a mystery drama on telly. Everything from Joanna's modesty to her sense of proportion is affronted by the notion. But the chill tug of logic brings her face to face with the facts.

 _Why didn't Sherlock see this?_ gasps the last of her denial.

Joanna shifts her gun to her pocket and squares her shoulders to face the truth.

Sherlock didn't see it because she kept the data from him, like an idiot, that's why. She never saw the connection between her own nasty anonymous letters and Elsie Patrick's, because connections aren't her strength--they're Sherlock's.

But it's past crying over, now. Joanna's lucky, really; she and Sherlock are strategically placed for this particular scenario. Sherlock may be the one-eyed king in the land of the blind when it comes to observation and analysis. But when it comes to staring down the barrel of an ugly series of implications--when all Sherlock's fine conclusions have carried them to the point that only action can save them--that's when Joanna takes over.

Joanna's never told him this, because it's got them into trouble often enough that she doesn't think it needs encouragement--but she loves Sherlock precisely _because_ he will pursue a line of inquiry pell-mell, only to stop short at the very last, bewildered by what he's got himself into, as though as though he literally never stops to wonder whether he's big or hard or _armed_ enough for what will need doing once he comes face to face with the trouble he's gone tearing after.

Joanna's seen most of the kinds of bravery that human beings are capable of, and she doesn't think Sherlock's sort is the least of them, by a long shot. All the same, she's glad it's just her, for this bit. And that she has her gun in her pocket, and the Met on her speed dial. It's not quite the same thing as calling down an airstrike, but she's got that number in her memory too, if she decides it's needful.

She presses her ear to the door, and hears nothing, not even the echo of an interior door slamming shut. She crouches below the level of the ground floor windows and pushes number 2 on her speed dial.

"Jo," says Lestrade, affably, after a ring or two. "'What's up?"

"I'm at the surgery, the one where I work," she says. "Sherlock's in Derbyshire, you can ring him for the details, but it was DI Martin all along--he drove Elsie Patrick to believe her husband meant to kill her, and he's been sending me letters too. It's quiet inside, too quiet for the hour, and I suspect he's waiting for me and he's got Sarah and others hostage."

Lestrade bursts into panicked sputters, but she overrides them in her best Captain Watson voice. "I'm going in," she says. "I'll keep the line open, but this is going to go easier if I can persuade him to trade me for the others."

"Do not _do that_ ," Lestrade shouts at her down the line. "You are not under any circumstances to do that, Joanna, I'll send a team out--"

"I'm sorry, Greg," she says. "But this is the best way to avoid casualities, and you know it." She hesitates for a second. "Incidentally, you're completely fanciable and if I end up trussed in Martin's boot, I'll take you for a pint after to apologize."

She drops the phone in her coat pocket, muffling the the predictable garbles of his protests. Just before she touches the door handle, she pauses and digs a small sheet of paper from her notebook, writes Sherlock's name at the top.

_If this goes wrong, I want you to know that I did it for me, not you. But you made it worthwhile, always._

It's as close to a goodbye as a superstitious soldier can permit herself on the verge of confronting the enemy, but Sherlock will understand.

Even as Joanna fits her key in the lock and angles her way through the door, she's aware that there are other, safer ways she might go about this. But on the one hand there is reason, and on the other there is the grey static that crackles at the edges of her vision, even here, even now. When it comes to being at the mercy of her impulses, she is no different than Sherlock, not really.

She just hopes he'll have a chance to understand that.

*

The back corridors interior to the clinic appear normal, at first glance, if empty were normal for this time of day, which it's not.

There ought to be nurses, busy about their duties, long-faced patients being led obediently from one exam room to another. There ought, at the very least, to be noise from the front desk, as Kevin, their very sweet, very gay, out-of-work-actor-cum-receptionist takes appointments over the phone and guides new patients through the mountains of NHS paperwork they'll need done before anyone can so much as take their temperature. But none of the normal noise is audible, and that is a very bad sign indeed.

Joanna can't secure the clinic on her own. She knew that before she got here, though, didn't she? Her objective is entirely different. _Completely mad,_ says a voice in her head that could be Sherlock's, could be Lestrade's, could be virtually anyone who's ever given a toss for her.

Joanna edges down the corridor, toward the main reception area. It's empty. Her spirits begin to lift. If he sneaked in ahead of time and bolted the doors--

But no. Martin's a little bloke, fussy--bit bulkier than her, perhaps, but Army training counts for something. He wouldn't risk a stand-off with Joanna unless he had some kind of leverage. He'll have at least one hostage. Probably more. As to where he's keeping them--there are too many dark, empty doors here. And only one room, in this sterile clinic, that would have any significance for Martin at all.

It's the one where she's been keeping pieces of him locked in the bottom of her drawer. _I feel it's time we meet, don't you?_

"Lestrade." She pulls the phone from her pocket, whispering. "You there?"

"What the sodding hell is going on?" is what passes for an answer.

"You definitely need to prepare for hostages," she says. "The interior of the clinic is clear so far as I can see. I think he must be holed up in my office with Sarah and our receptionist, at the very least, depending how soon he got her after opening."

"Martin?" Lestrade's voice is grim, but unquestioning, which means he must have spoken to Sherlock. "All right, Joanna, that's excellent work, but you need to get out of here now, do you understand me?"

"Can't," she says shortly. "I'm the one he's waiting for. I do have a bit of experience with this sort of thing, you know."

"That is _not the point_ ," Lestrade barks. "I know you have trouble remembering this but you are a _civilian_. You are not expendable!"

Joanna can't help but smile. Lestrade sounds like her dad when he uses that voice.

"Leave the building right now," he says. "My officers will need you to describe the floor plan--"

"It's government property, you've got the floor plans already. Don't fuss at me, Lestrade. Try to be quiet, or he'll make me turn the phone off. I'm going in."

_"Jo!"_

Joanna drops the phone into her pockets, snags the Browning out of her belt, and thumbs the safety off. Then, keeping her back flush to the wall, she pads silently down the hall to her office.


	8. Chapter 8

8.

There is a narrow window set in the top half of Joanna's office door, like the crenellation in a castle watchtower. Joanna is still hunkered low to the floor, but she can see Sarah, standing in front of Joanna's desk, her expression very calm indeed. Far too calm, in fact.

"Eyes on Sarah," Joanna mutters into the phone. "Appears unharmed. Can't see Martin or any others yet." She puts the phone away before Lestrade can start to harangue her again.

Joanna hopes, with all her might, that it is just Sarah in there, and not just because one hostage will be an easier trade than a group of hostages. Sarah is a doctor, familiar with the layout of the room. There are lots of sharp objects in a doctor's surgery. Martin's a DI, if he's got a single functioning brain cell left he'll be alert to the danger. But they don't just keep scalpels lying around where anyone can see them, which means Sarah will have the advantage.

Now Joanna comes to think of it, Martin must be emotionally compromised in the extreme, or he would never have picked a doctor's office for this kind of stand off in the first place. The lobby, with its lack of interior doors and windows, would have been a far better choice. Joanna files that fact away away, to use later, if she can.

She holds the Browning steady in her hand and considers how to proceed. She has a narrow window of opportunity. She can't risk taking the phone out again, but if Lestrade has, in fact, dispatched a hostage negotiation team to the clinic, they'll be hearing sirens any minute, and at the point the game will be up. Strategically, her best bet is to get a clear line of sight on Martin and fire on him--the shot she takes will be determined by the risk he poses. He might have a gun. He might have a second hostage to use for a shield. In either event, she'll have to take a kill shot, and God, she really doesn't want to do that.

Does he know she has a gun? It isn't like she's mentioned it on her blog, but he's a DI, with access to police records. If he looked up the Jefferson Hope shooting, he might have put the pieces together. She's sure Lestrade has, though he's tactfully not mentioned it.

Joanna shuts her eyes for a brief moment and forces her mind to clear. Puts aside all thoughts of Sarah, Kevin, Lestrade, even Sherlock, who, if he's spoken to Lestrade, must be tearing a path straight down from the north of England at the moment.

If this is going to be anything other than a brief, farcical interlude in which she hands herself over to Martin on a silver platter, she needs to have a single clear objective in mind. It can't be too complicated. She hasn't got the resources to singlehandedly free all the hostages, incapacitate Martin, and walk away free and unscathed. She must be prepared to make certain sacrifices.

She knows, with the absolute moral clarity that only comes in the heat of battle, that the only person she has the right to sacrifice is herself. But martyrdom will get them nowhere. It's got to _count_ for something.

Joanna walked into this situation, alone, outnumbered, against police advice, because she knows something that Lestrade, Sherlock, Martin, and probably even Mycroft (God, could Sherlock be panicked enough to have called his brother? That could be an embuggerance of epic proportions.) don't know.

She knows how men think. Specifically, she knows how men think about women--the women they want, the women who reject them, whether it's by glancing aside when a man eyes them in the street, or by shooting them down in the pub, or simply by not noticing them when they want to be noticed, whether or not they've done anything to attract that notice. At their best, such men are like young children, reaching thoughtlessly for what they want until someone slaps their hand away. At worst, the woman ceases to be a person in their eyes, becomes merely an obstacle in the way of their goal.

And that, Joanna knows, is when a man becomes truly dangerous--when he begins to mistake desire for necessity, as though he is thirsting to death and in all the wide desert there is only one well, guarded by an intractable, incomprehensible creature who simply refuses to understand that he is _burning._

A man who desires a woman in such a way might do anything to get what he wants from her. But nothing makes a man more vulnerable than a need that profound. It compromises his judgment in all sorts of exploitable ways.

A man who ceases to see a woman as a human being is equally unlikely to see her as a threat.

Joanna takes a deep breath. She pulls the phone from her pocket and says Lestrade's name.

"Don't argue with me, I haven't got the time," she says. "I'm going to try to persuade Martin to leave the clinic with me--just me. I don't know if he has a car, but I've got GPS enabled on my phone. And I'm armed. Once we're clear of the others, I'll try to subdue him."

"And what the _fuck_ is going to stop him from knocking you cold and stripping you down before he carries you off somewhere?" Lestrade's voice is ragged, like he's smoke a whole pack of cigarettes in an hour, though she knows he stopped over a year ago.

Joanna scrubs her hand over her face. "This is my fault," she says. "He's been stalking me for months and I never said anything, or Sherlock would have put the pieces together by now. I'm not going to let him hurt anyone because of me. Just--move fast, I don't know what he's armed with."

She puts the phone away again, and doesn't move until Lestrade's stopped calling her name. She looks down at the gun in her hand--solid, warm, reassuring--then engages the safety and tucks in the back of her waistband. She's wearing her lab coat, and it's too big for her by a couple of sizes, so there's a chance he won't see the outline even if he's looking for it.

As she walks to the door of her office, she is aware that she is very calm--that it is the unnatural calm that only people who are wired wrong right down at the base of their brain are capable of mustering in life or death situations. She's never been more grateful for it.

Joanna lifts her hand. There is no trace of a tremor. She knocks.

"Detective Inspector Martin," she calls. "Philip. It's Joanna Watson. I'm alone. Please, will you come out and speak with me?"

Through the window, Joanna catches Sarah's eye. Her calm expression crumples into a complicated avalanche of relief and fright. There's no audible response for a long moment, and Joanna simultaneously crosses her fingers and prays to whoever might be listening that she hasn't seriously miscalculated.

Then, Sarah, apparently acting on unheard orders, walks up to the door and opens it, slowly.

Joanna knows that Sarah's job is to report whether Joanna is telling the truth about being alone. There might be an advantage to letting her do so, but it doesn't cross her mind to take advantage of it. The instant she appears, Joanna grabs Sarah's hand and yanks her hard out the doorway. " _Run_ ," she hisses.

Sarah stumbles, and turns to face her with a stubborn expression. Joanna shoves her hard in the direction of the back entrance, and tries to infuse both pleading and confidence into her expression. Whatever Sarah sees there seems to convince her, because she gives her a torn look, then dashes down the corridor.

"Thank you, Philip." Joanna makes a point of keeping her voice as pleasant, as--well, _feminine_ as she knows how. "I know you must realize that Sarah is a friend of mine. I appreciate you letting her go. We don't really need anyone listening in, do we, anyway? You know what gossips girls are."

More silence. But at the back of it, a low, faint whimper--that'll be Kevin, with a scalpel to his throat, or God knows what. Joanna clenches a fist at her side. It's time to roll the hard six.

"Philip, please listen." She lets her voice tremble slightly. Somewhat to her disgust, it's not very difficult to manage. "I'd like it very much if you and I could go away somewhere. Alone, together. We can take your car. We can go anywhere you like. No one knows I'm here, I sneaked out behind Sherlock's back. But I'm going to be terribly nervous if there's anyone else with us, because--well, because we have important things to talk about, and I'm afraid I get rather shy. I'm sure you understand."

It's a curious sensation--but, even without Martin's speaking to her, or having his expression to analyze, Joanna knows she's spinning the web very neatly. She's not a trained hostage negotiator, as Lestrade would be the first to point out, at some length and volume, but she's trained for this sort of thing all the same, simply by living 35 years in the world with two X chromosomes. Wasn't that the first lesson society taught a girl, how to please a man? She doubts all the brain-rotting telly she watched as a kid had it quite in mind that she would someday weaponize those lessons, but it would probably be a good thing if they did. Perhaps, if she lives through this, she'll persuade Lestrade to have the Met fund quite a different sort of self-defense class for girls.

"I understand if you don't quite trust me yet," she says, infusing her voice with an extra wobble. "But what if you sent Kevin to the door? I promise I won't snatch him away. I'll just stand here, and he can tell you."

The time that elapses between this request, and Kevin's pale face appearing at the still open door can probably be measured in seconds, rather than minutes, but it feels longer than that to Joanna. She feels a spasm of relief. Kevin looks utterly terrified, but otherwise intact.

"Are you all right?" she says--deliberately not reaching for him, because she's done that once and Martin will be on his guard now, and for all she knows he has a gun trained on Kevin's back.

Kevin nods, mutely.

"It's going to be okay," she says.

And suddenly, Kevin's face crumples, like he's bursting into tears.

"I'm so _sorry_ , he says.

Before she can ask why, before she has time to do more than register the gleam of silver in his long, pale hand, Kevin's arm makes a wide arc through the air. Joanna leaps back, but not far enough, not in time, and what follows is less a series of thoughts than a confused jumble of impressions: the deep, burning heat that sears from her abdomen to her neck, the cold, unyielding floor that rises up to absorb her collapse, the scurry of Kevin's footsteps as he leaps over her body and dashes down the corridor.

Joanna is lying on her side, a fact she only realizes because she can see the thick pool of red blood forming alongside her. If she were on her back, the pool wouldn't have formed that quickly; most of the blood would be absorbed by her clothing. _Oh,_ she thinks, numbly. _This will be the shock, then._

Because she is lying on her side, she sees the feet, and the few inches of trousers above them, that move to stand beside her. She probably wouldn't have bothered rolling onto her back, even if she could, since she knows already what she would see above her. But then Martin stoops down to look her in the eye, and his dark doe's eyes seem for all the world to be compassionate, as though Joanna's lying in her own blood has nothing to do with him.

She fumbles for the use of her tongue. "You cut me," she says, hoarsely. "It's deep. Hurts."

Martin's mouth tips up at the corners. "Quid pro quo," he says.


	9. Chapter 9

9.

Joanna wakes, with her hands and legs tied, in a small dark space. A moment or so later, she realizes she's in the boot of a car.

 _Well, bugger,_ she thinks, and passes out again.

The next time she wakes, her thoughts are slightly clearer. She's already regretting that she ever joked to Lestrade about being trussed and stuffed in a boot, because it's bloody uncomfortable. Owing partly, she has no doubt, to the several-millimeter-deep laceration that starts left of her navel, traverses her abdomen, runs upward over her right breast, and skims her right collar bone. The collar bone is where it hurts worst--the flesh is thinnest, there.

Her clothes are stiff and sticky with dried blood. It's rather uncomfortable. And she's absolutely dying of thirst.

Joanna takes stock of her injuries as best she's able, considering she's bouncing around in a pitch black car boot and her ankles and wrists are secured with zip ties. (That was the inconvenience of being kidnapped by a police officer; proper criminals were endearingly old-fashioned in the use of pickable lock cuffs.) The simple fact that she's conscious tells her the cut's not that deep. Kevin, acting from a presumably sincere desire not to harm her, had put on a good show for Martin, but it was flash, rather than substance.

For purposes of escape, however, he might as well have hamstrung her. Cuts were like burns--the dangerous ones took their time to be felt, but shallow ones hurt like the very devil right from the start.

Joanna can tell by the absence of the weight at her back that Martin had found the gun. She can't tell if he found the phone, or the Swiss army knife in her trouser pocket. She hopes he didn't find the phone. She hopes that the GPS tracker is still ticking away, somewhere in this sodding car. She hopes she'll live long enough for Lestrade to be smug and say he told her so, long enough for Sherlock to--actually, she can't even imagine what Sherlock is going to say when they see each other again.

She hopes she gets the chance to find out.

She hopes, until she's forgotten what she's hoping for, as unconsciousness drags her into the undertow yet again.

*

The next time Joanna wakes up, she's lying on something soft. Not quite a bed; a mattress, on a concrete floor. She must be in a basement, because the concrete is inches from her nose, and she can smell the mold. Mold--something significant associated with mold in her mind. What was it--oh yes. Carl Power's trainers, in 221C.

Oh god, she _hopes_ Martin was daft enough to bring her to Baker Street. That would be utterly priceless. The thought makes her giggle involuntarily.

"Oh dear," says a voice, in the corner of the room across and opposite from her. "Have I done something amusing? Do let me in on the joke."

The sound of Martin's voice brings the reality of her situation crashing back in on Joanna. The smile dies on her lips. She tries to calm the pounding of her heart, as she rolls herself painfully onto her back. Whatever Martin's got planned for her, she'd just as soon see it coming.

She makes it onto her back. She emphatically does _not_ make it to a sitting position; the broken flesh bisecting her torso puts an effective halt to that. For a few seconds, the pain is all she can think about. Then the fog clears, along with her vision, and she realizes something even more paralyzing.

She's not wearing any clothes.

Joann is grateful for the pain, suddenly. It wipes away anything she might otherwise be feeling at the realization that she is bloody well _naked_ and tied to a bed in the presence of a mad bloke with a gun.

Eventually, she remembers that he asked her a question. "It's not that funny, really." Her words come out in short pants; she's still catching her breath. "Just thinking how predictable you lot are. Basements. Car boots. Nakedness. Like you learned it off the telly."

As soon as the words have left her mouth, she regrets them. If she makes him angry enough to hit her, she doubts she'll be able to stay conscious. She's running on fumes as it is.

But to her dismay, when Martin steps out of the shadows and into the light of the high narrow window behind her, he doesn't look angry at all. He looks, if anything, confused, and faintly hurt.

And _that_ is when Joanna feels a roil of genuine fear for the first time since this whole business started. Up until now, she thought she knew what game they were playing. Good guys versus bad guys, everyone well-versed in their roles.

But just looking at Martin, it's obvious that he's reading from a very different sort of script. And that is very nearly enough to frighten the piss out of Joanna, because now, she realizes, _she has no idea how he thinks the story is going to end._

"I'm not your enemy, Joanna." Martin comes to crouch at the foot of her mattress, and it takes all of Joanna's fortitude not to inch back from him. For a panicked instant, she thinks he too is naked, but he's only shirtless. "I don't mean you any harm. It was that hysterical little pansy who cut you. I never told him to do it."

Joanna stares at him. Should she play along, or challenge the delusion?

"I don't understand," she says softly. "You said 'quid pro quo'. I took that to mean you hurt me, because I--I'd somehow hurt you."

Martin chuckles, without much humor. "Well, you did at that. I can't pretend not to have enjoyed the reciprocity. I'm no mystic, but there is something rather satisfying in the notion of karma."

 _Karma,_ she thinks incredulously. She pictures Sherlock, Lestrade, all the Yarders she's known and befriended. _Your karma's going to be one hell of a bitch, mate. You've got no idea._

"Please, why am I tied up?" She talks fast, tries to make herself look small in the shadows. "It hurts, where Kevin cut me."

"I treated the cuts with iodine," says Martin. "It's not deep, I assure you, and the instrument, as you know, was sterile. You may have another scar for your already impressive collection." He tilts his head, bird-like. "I confess that I find your scars--rather alluring. Most women are identical under their clothes. But your skin. It's a map of the world. There is such history there. A man could lose himself, in that sort of depth."

A small, animal voice is shrieking at the back of Joanna's head. She summons all her discipline to ignore it, to force herself to evaluate the situation strategically.

 _If_ he rapes her--well, it won't be the worst thing in the bloody world. It's easy to forget that, but it's true. Torture would be much worse, and dying, obviously, would be worst of all. If he intends to rape her, he'll be--busy. Distracted. Joanna swallows hard against the sour creep of nausea at the back of her throat. He may want to do it more than once, which means he'll keep her here for awhile.

The more time he gives her, the more likely she is to be found. She has to hold onto that.

She's trembling head to foot, and not even trying to hide it. Perhaps he will interpret it as eagerness. Could she force herself to play the willing lover? If she can convince him that she truly desires him, he might untie her. She hasn't got quite the upper body strength she once had, but considering the motivation, she's fairly certain she could snap his neck. If she could convince him. If she can stay calm and focused, and keep herself from crying, or vomiting--

"But you said that I hurt you," says Joanna, aware that she sounds as desperate as she feels. "Please, tell me how. I didn't mean to. I don't want to do it again."

A second later, Joanna is convinced that her mind has snapped--that she's hallucinating. Because the voice that answers her doesn't belong to Martin. Martin himself whirls to face it, terror distending his rabbity features. The voice issues from the dark north corner of the room, where Martin had been hiding when first she woke up. The voice is chill and toneless, like a skull given the power of speech.

"Haven't you deduced that yet, Joanna?" The next noise she hears brings the reality flooding in on her, because it is an utterly _familiar_ noise, and yet she would swear she'd never consciously noticed it before, certainly not enough to reproduce it in a hallucination.

It is, quite simply, the faint _shush_ that Sherlock's greatcoat makes when it brushes against the fabric of his trousers.

Sherlock's voice. Sherlock, _here_.

For an immeasurable moment, Joanna ceases to breathe.

"You hurt him in the worst way that a woman can hurt a mediocre little man who possesses just enough cleverness to not be able to hide from his own miserable inadequacy." Sherlock's voice is high in mockery. "You _ignored_ him. He poured his venomous little heart out to you on paper. And then, every day, for weeks, he pored over your blog for the faintest mention of it, for proof that he had touched your life in his own little way. But you never said a word. To anyone." He pauses. "Not even to me."

"Sherlock." Joanna's mind, her entire body, is a battleground of conflicting urges and thoughts, but habitual priorities assert themselves first. "He has my gun, he took it off me when I blacked out."

Sherlock's laugh sounds like dry leaves skittering over pavement, as though his throat hasn't been moistened by anything but his own saliva in days. "Yes, he took it," he says. "He did not, however, keep it."

And then, for the first time, Sherlock walks into the light. His face is cadaver grey, his mouth twisted with loathing.

Joanna's gun is steady in his right hand, aimed directly at Martin's head.

"He isn't a _criminal_ , you see," says Sherlock, and there has never been anything as merciless as Sherlock's mockery. Children at school would have run from him, however much like prey he looked like, rather than hear that scathing voice turned on them. "No, our Detective Inspector Martin is a _lover_. I imagine his tastes in lovemaking are fairly pedestrian--moonlit walks by the seashore, with you in shackles and handcuffs, no doubt. Guns have no place in his romantic fantasies, so he put it aside."

Sherlock's head whips round, and he's no longer even pretending to address Joanna, because his tone isn't mocking now--it's the skull-voice he used before, and Joanna thinks that if he ever, ever turns it on her she'll have her gun up and between them in two seconds flat. "Which was a mistake, Martin. Obviously you lost command of your higher reasoning the moment Joanna came within your grasp, or you would never have take your hand off of it for a _second_ , because you would have known there was no hole on earth you could hide so deep I wouldn't _find her_."

Martin is crawling--actually crawling back toward the wall. As satisfying as this is to watch--and Joanna is purposefully not think about what else she may be feeling about anything else anyone may have said or done in this room in the last few moments--Martin is drawing uncomfortably close to her.

She is just swallowing to wet her throat, so she can demand Sherlock untie her before he gets on with any more dramatics, when Martin lunges toward with a strangely distraught cry, wrapping his body around her, pulling hard on her hair so that her head falls on his thin chest.

It's--horrible, yes, and utterly revolting, and makes Joanna want to shower for a week. But she has just enough time to think there's something rather said about it, too, before Sherlock crosses the room in two long strides, wraps his hands around Martin's neck, and simply wrenches him loose from Joanna. She cries out, as some of her hair comes loose in his clenched fist. She hears his strangled cry, his gagging attempts to breathe, as Sherlock drags him as far away from Joanna as the small room permits and throws him hard against the concrete wall.

Martin makes no attempt to gather himself up. He simply wraps his hands around his neck, curls himself into a fetal shape, and begins to sob.

And that should be that. It's over, Martin's no longer a threat. Joanna doesn't understand why her own limbs haven't uncoiled, why she feels no relief.

Until a half-second later, when she realizes that Sherlock is still holding the gun on Martin. His finger is on the trigger. And for the first time since she's known him, Sherlock's hands are not completely steady.

"Sherlock." His name comes out as a whisper. She's frightened; possibly more frightened than she was ten minutes ago, before Sherlock entered the room, and she isn't sure why. "Sherlock, please--"

Joanna doesn't quite know what she's asking him for. But something in her voice seems to break the odd spell that's possessed him. He comes back to life in one swift movement, secured the gun in his waistband, stooping to unsheathe the knife at his boot. For a second, she doesn't breathe, but then Sherlock turns away from Martin and crouches by her mattress. He carefully doesn't look at her face at he cuts the zip ties binding her wrists and ankles, but she sees how his eyes follow the long gash that winds up her torso. Something that had been granite-hard in the line of his mouth breaks for an instant, but he doesn't pause, merely flings his long coat from off his shoulders and covers her with it like a blanket. Joanna can't help noticing that he hasn't turned back to check on Martin once. She doesn't say anything, but Sherlock seems to read the question in her face, because he gives her a ghostly approximation of his normal smile.

"I drugged him," he says, producing a hypodermic syringe from his pocket. The needle's been snapped off; not, Joanna devoutly hopes, in Martin's neck. "He'll be quite docile while we decide what to do with him."

Joanna uses both hands, sore and numb as they are, to propel herself into a sitting position. Sherlock's own hand, rather more usefully, supports her back between the shoulder blades and levers her upright. She winces, but manages not to cry out. Sherlock notices, however, and frowns.

"I have more," he says. "It's hydrocodone."

Joanna shakes her head. "I'll wait for the paramedics, thanks." She catches something off in Sherlock's expression, and narrows her eyes. "You have called the police, haven't you? Lestrade will be off his head by now."

Sherlock doesn't answer. He stands up, and turns to look at Martin, whose sobs have quieted to a kind of infantile babbling. In the light from the single window, Joanna can see the gun in sharp relief at Sherlock's hip.

"Have you put it all together yet?" he says, facing Martin, but addressing her. "Why Elsie Patrick? Why the dancing men?"

"I--" Joanna swallows the explanation that comes immediately to mind, because, of course, it must be the wrong one, or Sherlock wouldn't be asking her. "You said--we looked alike, me and Elsie."

"It was never about Elsie." An indefinable heaviness seems to settle over him, and the skull-like quality returns to his voice. "It was you, Joanna. Always you. Mycroft's people examined the IP addresses logged by your web domain. He's been haunting your blog for months, he spent hundreds of hours a week perusing it. He was the source of three-quarters of your anonymous comments. He began writing you letters--"

"Did Lestrade tell you that?" Joanna asks, simply because she is certain that the answer is 'no'.

"When Mycroft saw you this morning, he deduced immediately that you knew yourself to be in some kind of danger. He had your office searched and discovered the letters Martin sent you. He recognized the writing immediately--or rather, he recognized that it was the same that appeared in the letters Elsie Patrick received. The moment he examined Elsie Patrick's university records and found Martin's connection to her, it all became quite obvious."

Sherlock turns half toward her, though his eyes do not leave Martin's prone figure. "When you failed to make any mention on your blog of the threats you'd received via post, Martin upped the stakes. Created a mystery intriguing enough to capture my attention, and therefore yours--a mystery you would consider worthy of immortalizing in prose." For once, there isn't a trace of mockery in Sherlock's voice when he refers to her writing. "It was a tawdry little problem. Boring. Not a single facet of interest--apart from the dancing men. Martin had studied us, you see. He knew I would never be able to resist a case that involved such a freakish element. And you--he knew you would follow where I led."

Joanna slumps against the wall, her bare back in direct contact with the chill concrete. She doesn't feel it. She doesn't feel anything--not her arms, legs, or face. Only the sourness rising in her stomach proves that she still belongs to a body with an intact nervous system.

She stands up. She barely feels the long cut, still oozing blood. She lets Sherlock's coat drop to the mattress, walks two steps away from it, then pitches forward and vomits. She only just manages to catch the wall with her hand before she strikes her head.

At last, her stomach heaves itself dry. When she tries to stand up again, she weaves sideways and nearly falls. Sherlock, who has moved in silently behind her, throws his coat over her shoulders and wraps his arms around her waist, delicate of her wound. He braces her until her head stops spinning and she steps away from him to lean against the wall.

"He destroyed their lives," she whispers. Her throat is rough. "He ruined them. So I would write about it on my _blog_?" She wheels on Sherlock, incredulous, very nearly angry with him, simply for saying it. "And they can't even charge him with--he's going to get _away_ with it! With murdering two people!"

The silence in the room is so muffling that Joanna is hardly aware of it until Sherlock reaches for the gun at his side. He presents it to her over his arm--a curiously formal gesture, like something from another century. She stares at it, not moving.

"Civil law permits the use of deadly force to prevent rape." Sherlock's voice is perfectly even and uninflected. "Mycroft will make certain that the gun is found to have belonged to Martin."

"Put that away," Joanna whispers. "For God's sake, Sherlock, don't--"

Sherlock's expression doesn't change. He turns back to Martin. In his free hand, it is easy to see the fine tremors in the long fingers.

"I understand why you would find it repugnant even under the circumstances," he says a moment later, and this time his voice is _not_ even. "But I would not, Joanna."

It is both an offer, and a plea. Joanna covers her face with her hands to muffle the short, hoarse scream that she knows is coming. Then she collects herself, wipes her face, walks over to Sherlock, and pulls the gun gently but steadily from his unresisting fingers. She drops the magazine, puts it in one pocket of the coat, and the gun itself in the other.

They face each other, both trembling. Sherlock's hands are white-knuckled fists.

"You didn't tell me," he whispers. "He threatened you for weeks, and you never--

Joanna forces herself to meet his eyes then. What she sees makes her look away again immediately.

A moment later they are interrupted by footsteps approaching the door at a rapid pace, just short of a run. The door bursts inward, albeit in a strangely tidy way.

"Sherlock." Mycroft's voice is sharp--controlled, as always, but only just. He rakes the room with his gaze. "What have you--"

"He's only drugged," says Joanna, because she knows precisely what Mycroft was afraid of, precisely why he is here, and why he will trust her word over Sherlock's in this one precise moment.

It must have taken all Mycroft's resources to arrive here ahead of Lestrade. Police sirens have been drawing closer and closer for five minutes at least.

"Joanna." Mycroft's gaze comes to settle on Joanna. He seems to make an effort to school his features. They don't become gentle, so much as respectful. He takes what Joanna could almost believe is an unconscious half-step toward her, but Sherlock stiffens, and a moment later it's as though Mycroft had never moved at all.

He glances ever so slightly over his shoulder--a perfectly casual and barely noticeable gesture, but then he steps out of the room, and his assistant, Anthea, walks in. She ignores Sherlock--she's one of the few people Joanna's met who can do that without it being a nerve-wracking, full-bodied effort--and looks straight at Joanna.

"I have some things for you, Dr Watson," she says. She's holding a shopping bag from a high end retail store--too pricy for Joanna's budget though she is certain that everything will fit perfectly and look precisely like what she always wears, only without the holes, bulges, and stains.

Mycroft arranged this obviously. Mycroft knew what Martin--Joanna shakes the thought away. Anyway, it must have been Anthea who did the shopping. Joanna's always admired her taste. It's a pity she's just going to get blood all over--

"No," she says.

Anthea blinks, but her expression stays neutral. Not the same neutral as Mycroft, who politely abstains from reacting to things, or Sherlock, who finds things either beneath his interest or, on very rare occasions, so far outside his expertise that he doesn't dare comment. Anthea's expression is simply--neutral. She's waiting to see what Joanna will say next.

"Keep the clothes for me," she says, "I expect I'll need something nice to wear in court."

Anthea actually blinks. It's the closest Joanna's ever seen her come to showing surprise. "I can arrange something before--"

"Keep the clothes," says Joanna again. She's aware that Sherlock is standing in the corner, watching her.

She strides over to where Martin lies, still drugged and barely conscious. With the same efficient ruthlessness she had used to strip feverish soldiers of their soiled uniforms in field hospitals, Joanna divests Martin of his trousers. They fit her in the leg well enough, once she rolls the cuffs a few times, but she needs his belt to keep them on her hips, so she nicks that too. She glances around for the shirt he must have shucked off while she was unconscious; not until she turns round far enough to face Sherlock does she realize he's holding it out to her. Of course he spotted it first. Bloody typical.

Only as she's doing the buttons up with a vicious energy does she realize she's crying. She's crying, and she's furious, and if one bloody Holmes or Holmes-attache makes one single bloody remark--

When she's got the shirt buttoned, she finds Sherlock holding the coat out almost hesitantly. "What?" she snaps. "Not decent enough yet?"

Sherlock's eyes flutter shut. Joanna remembers four days ago, before the case, when Sherlock pinned her to a wall and she disarmed him with a touch. The breath that catches in her throat is half a sob. Sherlock's eyes open again, as though nothing had happened, as though he'd just caught a piece of grit in his lashes.

"It's cold outside," he says simply.

Joanna's fingers curl into the thick, warm wool of the coat. She shuts her own eyes. Unlike Sherlock, she doesn't open them again for a long time.

When she does, she finds that the side of her face is stuck rather damply to the breast pocket of Sherlock's shirt, that his coat is hanging from her shoulders like a cloak, and his arms are circled round her in a grip she could break one-handed, but is somehow strong enough to keep her on her feet when it feels like all the rest of the world is dragging her down.

Eventually, she straightens up and dries her eyes. To her surprise, and her lack of it, all traces of Mycroft and Anthea have vanished without a trace.

Joanna is somehow unsurprised that they've managed to spirit Martin away with them.


	10. Chapter 10

10.

"The paramedics have probably arrived by now," says Sherlock a few seconds later. He studies her face, like he's judging her color. "Do you want to call them down, or go out to meet them?"

"I can walk a bit," Joanna tells him, trying to sound confident. "Best if you stay close, though."

Sherlock's hand tightens on her waist. He pulls out his phone and sends a text. "I'm telling Lestrade he can stop the search," Sherlock explains while typing. "The Met will have swarmed the building by now."

"Should I ask how you and Mycroft both reached me ahead of that lot?"

"It was Mycroft who discovered your location. He alerted me, I texted Lestrade. I was closest, and I wasn't going to hang about for a rendezvous with either of them. I knew the longer Martin had you, the greater the chances--"

"Right." Joanna cuts him off. "That was--yes. Good." She feels suddenly rather desperate to be out of the moldy little room. "Shall we just--"

Before Joanna can manage to put one foot in front of the other, however, there is a clatter of footsteps on the stairs outside the room. She can't quite stop herself tensing, but she isn't at all surprised when it turns out to be Lestrade who throws the door wide.

"Sherlock! Where--oh, thank sodding Christ." Lestrade's eyes light on her almost immediately, and he sags nearly double in relief. "Jo. You all right?"

Joanna shrugs a shoulder, hoping this will be enough to reassure Lestrade. But his pleasantly rumpled face remains half caved-in with stress and exhaustion. He stares at her, and Joanna, self-conscious, looks down at her clothes. There's a spreading bloodstain across the front of Martin's white dress shirt.

She pulls Sherlock's coat tight across her chest and sighs loudly, irritated.

"What've you done with the little wanker?" Lestrade demands, his voice rough.

"No idea," says Sherlock, sounding bored.

Even in the room's dim light, Joanna can see Lestrade's shoulders stiffen. "Sherlock," he says, "if he turns up in a skip, I'm not going to be able to--"

"Mycroft has him," says Joanna wearily. "Elsie Patrick was one of Mycroft's people. Martin's answering for his actions to a lot of toff spooks right now. Mycroft will probably be in touch." She looks at Lestrade, then back over her shoulder at Sherlock. "People really do tend to assume you're the murderer, don't they?"

A smile lifts the corners of Sherlock's mouth.

"Well, no one could fault your reasons, if you had killed him," says Lestrade, still sounding a bit cautious. "I might have done it myself, depending on what I found when I got here." He looks down at Joanna, and his mouth twists. "I might do for _you_ yet, you daft bint. Do you know, the last thing to come over the phone before we lost the connection was you saying he'd cut you? I thought we were going to find _bits_ of you on the floor of that surgery."

Joanna opens her mouth, then shuts it again. If Lestrade's finally taken to calling _her_ the same sorts of names he calls Sherlock, then apparently she's lost her status as the sane one. "Sorry to worry you," she says. "You found Sarah and Kevin though? They're all right?"

"Well, they aren't bleeding all over the floor, at least." Lestrade shakes his head. "Sherlock, why the hell haven't you got her up to the ambulance yet?"

"I was delayed," says Sherlock through gritted teeth.

"Well, I want out of this room yesterday," Joanna tells them. "And I'm fully prepared to rugby-tackle the pair of you to make it through that door, so--"

All of a sudden, Joanna finds herself nestled possessively under Sherlock's arm, and hurried out of the room in a way that makes her think that he must have had a large teddy bear as a boy, and been prone to handling it the same way, to prevent other children taking it away from him. Which suits her fine, just at the moment. Lestrade walks ahead of them, issuing instructions into his radio, and as Joanna watches his back, something cold and tense in her stomach warms and begins to unclench. She may be in enemy territory, but she has Sherlock at her back and Lestrade taking point, and for the first time since she left the army, she feels the security of being in the company of comrades-at-arms.

Despite everything, it makes her feel like a lucky woman.

*

Joanna doesn't faint in the ambulance, so much as she surrenders to the combined tugs of exhaustion, trauma, terror, and really first-rate drugs. She wakes up already knowing she's lying in a hospital bed, even before she opens her eyes. She's spent a large part of her life in hospitals, and the tell-tale noises and smells have seeped into her awareness as she was sleeping.

Not all the noises in the room are hospital-standard, however. She distinctly hears Sherlock being snide at someone, though he seems to be making an effort to do it quietly. Not until she hears the gravelly voice that responds does she realize he's being snide at _Lestrade_. She forces her eyes to open, and her brain to focus.

"You don't need her to give you a statement tonight. You were _there_ for all the important parts."

Lestrade sighs. "I'm not going to bully her if she doesn't feel up to it. I'm just going to ask."

"Come to think of it, why not have a holiday, hand the case off to someone else?" says Sherlock, his voice high and biting. "You must have some _other_ colleague who's just _dying_ to meet Joanna."

Lestrade's mouth falls open. Guilt, anger, and embarrassment flood his already-strained features. "I--"

"Ignore him, Greg," says Joanna. Her voice is a low croak, but she's determined to nip this in the bud before Sherlock can work up a head of steam. "It's not your fault. You weren't to know."

She watches Lestrade give Sherlock a classic look of, 'well look who's gone and woken her, well done.' He walks over to her bed reaches down to cover her hand with his. "You look better," he says.

"Glad to hear it," she says. "I'll give you a statement, if you can scare up some tea for us first."

"Good idea." He picks up his suit jacket, slung over the rail at the end of her bed. "It'll give you some time to wake up. Good tea in a hospital's not easy to find."

"I expect she could help," says Joanna, her eye landing on Anthea, who's sitting in the corridor outside, bent over her phone.

"Ah." As far as Joanna knows, Lestrade's never been officially introduced to Mycroft or his PA, but he's too sharp not to have come to know them by sight. "Right. I'll just--see about that, then."

Lestrade exits the room, pulling the door shut after him. Joanna turns her head on her pillow. Sherlock is standing across the room, looking out the window.

"How are you?" she finds herself asking.

Sherlock turns and gives her the incredulous look she had more or less been expecting. "What do you mean, how am _I_?" he demands. "I'm not the one with one hundred and twenty seven stitches holding my internal organs inside my body."

"Oh, lovely. Melodrama. Well, as long as you're keeping yourself entertained."

Sherlock gapes at her for a moment. His face goes through too many changes of expression for her to track.

And then, he explodes. There's really no other word for it.

"He cut you open!" Sherlock shouts. "He kidnapped you, shoved you in a car boot, and tied you up! He would have raped you! What about that, precisely, am I meant to be _entertained_ by? You're the _feelings_ expert, is this the best your tiny little brain can do with the data at hand? Or is this the sort of thing only you _caring_ sort understand? Please explain it to me, Joanna, because obviously I'm out of my depth. Is this what _normal_ people do to their friends, keep them in the dark for weeks when they're in danger, when they're being _stalked_? Did you think, being a mere sociopath, I would find it _amusing_ to wake up one morning to a text from the Yard informing me that my flatmate was not, in fact, drinking her usual cup of tea at the breakfast table, but instead turning up in _pieces_ all across Westminster?"

"Sherlock."

Joanna can't move. She can't sit up, can't look at Sherlock, can't speak, can't breathe. But the door has opened, and Mycroft is standing just inside the room, his face grave.

"Fuck _off_ , Mycroft!" Sherlock bellows at him. "You've done quite enough for one day already!"

"You are overwrought. It is most unfair of you to burden Joanna in this way. She is in no fit state to answer you."

Joanna shuts her eyes, like she's a child, hoping everything in the room will go away as soon as she can't see it anymore. A moment later, the door slams shut. She opens her eyes again. Mycroft is still at the foot of her bed, but Sherlock has gone.

"I would apologize for my brother," says Mycroft, tapping his umbrella once against the tile floor, then meandering toward the chair at her bedside. "But if once I began, I hardly know where I would end."

"No need," says Joanna, in a voice so low she doubts anyone other than Mycroft would be able to hear her. "He wasn't entirely out of line."

Mycroft arches an eyebrow, and settles himself delicately in the chair. "That is a rather intriguing statement. Do you regret your actions?"

Joanna has had conversations with people who were actually _paid_ to listen to her talk about her feelings, without ever being able to tell them a single honest or revealing thing about herself. Why, in God's name, she should want to unburden herself to Mycroft Holmes of all people, is a mystery that probably only the drugs in her IV can explain.

"I had my reasons," she says. "But they weren't--I wasn't thinking about how it would affect him. And I know better. I probably know better than just about anyone that he can--be affected."

Mycroft clears his throat. "Sherlock has gone to great lengths in his life to portray himself as unfeeling. If his efforts have produced distasteful effects, he has no one to blame but himself."

"It's not like I was trying to teach him a lesson." Joanna's throat is so dry suddenly she can barely get the words out. Mycroft, in his eerie, yet strangely comforting Holmesian way, immediately pours a cup of water from the plastic pitcher by her bed, and passes it to her. She takes a sip. "His reactions surprised me a little, though."

"Mm." Mycroft takes the empty water cup back from her and steeples his fingers on his knee. "He has had few relationships of any real depth in his life, and none, outside the family, that compare in any way to yours." He's silent for a moment, like he's making up his mind about something. "I believe you may be the first woman, apart from our mother, to whom he has developed any sort of attachment whatever. Sherlock would balk at the notion--in fact, I believe you observed him _balking_ in grand style, just a moment ago--but we had a rather old fashioned upbringing. However little we may--ah, profess ourselves admirers of the fair sex, we were raised with rather nice ideas of what is due to them."

"So what, Sherlock nearly shot Martin for me out _chivalry_?" She doesn't quite say, _Pull the other one, Mycroft,_ but it's in her tone.

"Not at all. But I hardly need to tell you that the day-to-day lives of women are perilous, in a way that men's are not. I believe Sherlock has only just realized that caring for a woman is rather like caring for a soldier. On some level, one _will_ worry for her. Constantly."

Joanna isn't sure this conversation could get more surreal if the painkillers dripping through her IV were laced with hallucinogens. "How did you get so enlightened, then?" she says, not sure if she means it for a joke or not.

"Experience." The smile Mycroft gives her is small, fleeting, and rueful.

A moment later there is a brief knock at the door. Anthea steps inside, without waiting for an invitation. "You're to be discharged in the morning," she tells Joanna, not even acknowledging Mycroft. "I've brought you something to change into."

"Oh. Thanks." Joanna looks at the shopping bag hanging from Anthea's arm. It isn't the same bag as before. For a moment, Joanna considers asking exactly how much clothing Anthea keeps on hand for her at any given moment. Then she decides she doesn't want to know.

"Very thoughtful of you," murmurs Mycroft, in quiet approval. Joanna looks at Mycroft's softened expression, follows his gaze to Anthea, who is arranging the contents of the bag in the drawers of the small hospital dresser, and blinks.

Oh. _Oh._

When Anthea has finished, Mycroft rises. "My best wishes for your speedy recovery, Joanna," he says. "And let us hope that we will have no further need of these little bedside chats. Do call, if you need anything. Incidentally, the teams in charge of your surveillance have been demoted and redistributed. This--business should never have happened. I am seriously disappointed in them."

"Surveillance?" says Joanna, weakly. _Teams?_ she thinks.

"My brother and Detective Inspector Lestrade are just outside. Shall I send them in?"

"Sure." Joanna swallows. "Er, thank you. For--everything."

Mycroft merely nods, before turning his back. Anthea, in his wake, looks at Joanna over her shoulder and, startlingly, grins.

Lestrade enters a moment later, holding a paper tray with tea and a few individual packets of biscuits. He places the tray on her bedside table, and, when Joanna asks, helps her locate the remote control that will elevate her bed to a sitting position.

Sherlock lopes in a few seconds later, hands shoved deep in his pockets, shoulders hunched practically to his ears. At first, Joanna thinks he's so caught up in his sulk that he isn't even going to look at her.

But then he does, looking so exactly like a child that Joanna can't do anything but smile at him.

Considering how little he does it, it's rather odd that when he smiles back, he looks more like himself than he has all evening.


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The quote of Mycroft's thate Sherlock deleted is from Ecclesiastes. As far as I remember, it goes something like, "I have found one good man in a thousand, but not one woman."
> 
> Thanks so much for the hits, the comments, the kudos. You've made writing the story a great pleasure.

11.

Joanna is beginning to get an inkling of how Chinese Water Torture (assuming that was ever a real thing, and not just a Fu-Manchu-esque invention put about during the days of the Empire to foster anti-Asian feeling) is supposed to work.

It begins with sensory deprivation--such as forcing the subject to recline on an unobjectionably soft surface, like the sofa in the sitting room of 221B, then covering her eyes with a cool cloth. Pleasant enough in itself. Then the room is made entirely quiet, ostensibly to assist in the recovery of the subject, who, ideally for the purposes of the experiment, is unable to sit up or get about much on her own, owing to the more than one hundred stitches holding her abdomen together.

Then a single sensory element is added to this inescapable environment--this prison, in fact. Water, dripping softly, incessantly, on a single patch of exposed skin, in the classic model. Or a noise, if you're being creative. A small, quiet noise--like typing on a laptop keyboard. Not a steady patter of typing, created, for instance, by composing an e-mail, or a blog entry. Just single taps. One, two, or three at a time. Then silence, for just long enough to fool the subject into thinking it's all over. Then another tap. Silence. Tap tap. Silence.

Tap.

"Right," mutters Joanna, peeling the cloth from her eyes and tossing it aside. She squints into the light and braces her hand against the floor. "That's it. I'm going."

"What?" The tapping ceases. It is swiftly replaced by the brush of fabric against the seat of a padded computer chair, as her torturer/prison guard/nursemaid rises and pads swiftly over to the sofa. "What do you think you're doing? Stop it. I said stop!"

"I'm going to my room," Joanna mutters. "I can't bear it."

"What can't you bear? Do you need pills? I have them, here." Sherlock fumbles in his trouser pocket and produces a small, rattling bottle.

"I need quiet!" Joanna barks, to cover the groan as she forces herself, panting, to sit upright against the cushions.

"But it _is_ quiet." Her vision clears just enough to take in Sherlock, peering down on her in confusion. "Appallingly, unbearably quiet." He squints. "Is it too quiet? I could play my violin."

"Dear--God." Joanna shudders. "Thank you, Sherlock, but no." She gasps for air, then exhales mightily. "Will you help me up the stairs, then, or shall I crawl?"

"Sarah said you're not to do that," says Sherlock, frowning at her. "I could carry you, if you like."

"On second thought, perhaps I can bring myself to faint here."

"You're behaving very strangely." Sherlock crosses his arms. "Is this a new symptom? Disorientation? Has your wound become febrile?"

Joanna crosses her arms across her chest, before Sherlock gets any bright ideas about hitching her nightshirt up for a close examination. "No," she says, between gritted teeth. "It's--the laptop, Sherlock. The hunt-and-peck typing. It's driving me mad."

"Oh." Sherlock takes a step back. "I'm editing a monograph. Checking the commas. I always leave a few out, in the initial rush of composition."

"You couldn't wait on that, I suppose."

"Well, I can't do it in another room, or I might not hear you if you called for me. And I have to do _something_." The petulance in his voice warns Joanna of precisely what she'd been most afraid of, when Sherlock reacted to Mycroft's offer of a temporary live-in nurse with the snarl he reserved exclusively for what he perceived as Mycroft's most egregious attempts at meddling in his life.

"You couldn't listen to music?" Joanna suggests. "With headphones?"

"Did that while you were sleeping. Got bored."

"Read?"

"Did that this morning. Finished everything that's not--"

"Boring." Joanna sighs. "Right."

"Hmm." Sherlock looks her up and down, then returns to his laptop. She hears his fingers run lightly over the board, a short chain of keystrokes that don't, thank Heavens, fall on her ears like water dripping irregularly from a great height.

"What are you doing?" she says, though she strongly suspects she will regret asking.

"Googling for suggestions how to keep bedridden patients entertained." Joanna rolls her eyes with such force that her upper body falls backwards against the sofa cushions. "God, how dull. These results can't possibly be supported by clinical trials, all the patients would have expired of the tedium. _Checkers._ Honestly."

Sherlock spins in his chair to face her again. "You're a doctor. What do you do to ease the suffering of your patients?"

"I perform complex medical procedures and prescribe medications. I'm a doctor, Sherlock, not a cruise director. Patients get by on their own afterwards. Or their friends and family visit them."

"Ah!" Sherlock brightens. Then his expression falls again. "You've already seen Harry--"

Joanna twitches.

"--Lestrade and Sarah come around as often as their work permits, Murray stopped in last night with a cadre of your former fellow servicemen. Even Mycroft's visited, not to mention that insufferable prat, Kevin."

"Yes, well," says Joanna, "I'd have been more sociable before getting myself kidnapped if I'd known what was at stake." She clears her throat, very nearly regretting what she's about to say before she's even said it. "I suppose we could--talk. To each other."

Sherlock doesn't say anything, but she can see his nostrils flare. They haven't talked much since the hospital. In fact, their last multi-syllabic exchange was the one Mycroft interrupted, and it hadn't been an exchange so much as a furious outburst on Sherlock's part that nearly drained Joanna of what little strength she'd regained since Martin's attack.

There is, of course, a very good reason for this mutual reticence. Lestrade has, quite intentionally, been withholding any and all cases from Sherlock until Joanna is up and on her feet again, and no sufficiently interesting problems have come in through Sherlock's website in the last three days to capture his attention. In other words, they have no work, and in the absence of work, the only real topic of conversation left is the one they've both been assiduously avoiding.

"I am under strict instructions not to say anything to you that will impede your recovery by causing you anxiety," says Sherlock, in a voice between a sulk and a growl. "Both Lestrade and my brother have informed me that if I distress you unduly, there will be consequences."

Joanna blinks at Sherlock. Lestrade, she understands. Ever since the night of The Incident, when Sally thrust her bleeding, bedraggled form into Lestrade's arms before going back into the collapsing swim club for Sherlock, Joanna and the detective inspector have developed a mutually affectionate relationship that is, in turns, paternal, comradely, and, 'yeah, we'd probably be shagging if one of us wasn't still hung up on his ex-wife and the other wasn't joined at the hip to her mad flatmate.'

 _Mycroft_ , though.

"And here I was, under the impression that Mycroft kept an eye on _me_ to make sure I didn't unduly distress _you_ ," she says carefully.

Sherlock waves a dismissive hand. "You refused to take his money," he says. " _Nobody_ does that. He calls you his 'good woman in a thousand'."

"…he what?"

"It's from a poem, I think. The Bible, maybe. I deleted it."

"Right." Joanna shuts her eyes out of self-defense. "I'm touched. And slightly terrified."

"He was livid when his surveillance failed to turn up Martin's letters." Sherlock is typing again. Not properly typing. Tap-tap typing. She knows him far too well to think he's not doing it on purpose.

"Seems harsh." Joanna keeps her eyes shut. " _You_ didn't know about them, and you live with me."

Tap. Tap tap tap.

Tap.

"Your comparison is false," says Sherlock, his voice rigid. "To Mycroft's people, you are just another subject. You're my flatmate. I trust you." Tap, tap. "It isn't hard to fool someone you trust."

Joanna leans up slightly, an ice-wash flooding her stomach. "Is that what you think? That I didn't trust you?"

Sherlock, very deliberately, doesn't answer.

"It wasn't like that," she says. "I'm sorry if that's what you thought. I'd have apologized before now, but I didn't think you cared much about apologies."

There is a sudden, violent clatter of plastic and metal. Joanna winces, involuntarily. Sherlock has swept his laptop, along with a an old tea tin stuffed with pencils and biros, off the surface of the desk and into the seat of the armchair. He hasn't seen her wince, which is probably for the best. He springs to his feet and throws a hand into the air, gesticulating furiously.

"I am not waiting for an apology, I am waiting for _answers_!" he cries. "I have been over and over the data and I can't make it _fit_. You are the most practical, rational woman I know. You are fully aware that I could have ended Martin in a heartbeat. But you didn't tell me. You were the object of a stalker, and unlike most women in such a position you could have put a stop to it immediately, but you didn't! It makes no sense! I am clearly missing some vital piece of information, and that is _intolerable._ "

Sherlock isn't shouting at her, precisely, but at this volume he's going to bring Mrs Hudson down on them soon. Joanna draws a deep breath. There are so many things she could say to answer him, but half of them lead down paths she isn't prepared to travel yet. She tries to think of something to say that will answer him, at least in part, without exposing all the things she doesn't want to say to his x-ray mental vision.

"You don't usually keep it in the paracetamol bottle," she blurts out.

"What?" Sherlock stares at her like she's just begun to recite the periodic table backwards, in Romanian.

"The cocaine," she tells him. "Sometimes you keep it under the skull, or in the toe of that Victorian lady's slipper on the mantel. You have other hiding places, I expect, but I don't go poking in your room."

Sherlock's mouth slumps open, like he's lost control of the muscles of his lower jaw.

"I don't go poking," she repeats, "but I keep track. I take note when you start to show the signs, and as long as it doesn't go for longer than a few days in a period of two or three months, I don't say anything. The only reason I yelled at you on Tuesday was because you'd clearly been strung out the whole four days you were sleeping rough, and it had only been a week since the last time."

Sherlock shuts his mouth with an effort. It takes him a few seconds to find his voice, and his speech comes out sounding rough. "So you didn't tell me you were in danger as revenge for me being high?" His voice is deep, nothing like a child's, but there is something childishly broken in it, nonetheless. "Or you didn't think I could do the job while I was using."

"No, Sherlock! No, for God's sake." Joanna sighs. "It's nothing like that. I'm saying--I understand, about the cocaine. And the morphine. Yes, I know about that too. I don't like it, and I'm not going to let you kill yourself with it. And if it ever gets out of hand. I will, so help me God, call Lestrade _and_ your brother. But I'm never going to judge you doing what you need to do to keep yourself sane because I don't live in your head. I don't know what it's like in there." She takes a deep breath. "And you don't know what it's like in mine. We both have our ways of--coping."

Sherlock stares at her. His eyes are so wide, so bright, that at first, she thinks, _yes, he's got it, he understands what I'm saying, but it's not enough, he's going to blow up at me, and then it will be weeks more of this silence and brooding and God, I can't handle that now. Why did I think now was a good time to have this conversation?_

But Sherlock doesn't say anything. He doesn't erupt at her, doesn't scoff or pick apart her logic with his ruthless hammer of a brain. He just stands there, staring.

Then--haltingly--he crosses the room, in three strides. He stops when he reaches the sofa. Then he drops to his knees, a controlled collapse. He's so tall that, even in this position, their heads are almost of a height.

"I didn't think anyone--" he starts to say.

Then Sherlock's face crumples. It's terrible to witness, like the collapse of a beautiful piece of architecture. He slumps forward and brings his forehead to rest on Joanna's knees. His long pale fingers thread their way into the riot of his dark hair, tugging hard against the roots.

When she hears the low, twisted noises he's making, Joanna thinks at first that he's crying--actually _crying_ \--and she gapes down at his bared head, horrified, helpless, and scared. But then she realizes that what she's hearing are words, choked, babbling words, muffled so as to be unintelligible because his face is pressed against her leg. She can barely make out half of what he's saying, but it's enough, far more than enough, and her breath catches in her throat.

"--not in a thousand, a million, a _hundred_ million, no one ever just lets me be _me_ , and it's all a fucking farce, because I might not ever have met you, it's utter blind chance that I ever found you at all, and that's _terrifying,_ because you let me be who I am, and I need that like I need _air_ , and I won't, Joanna, I won't let _anyone_ take you away from me, not ever again, I'll burn London to the _ground_ before I let them--"

"Hey." Alarmed, Joanna leans forward a bit, biting back the gasp of pain, and rests her hands on Sherlock's head. His hair is silky at the tips, hot and slightly damp at the roots, like he's feverish. "Sherlock. It's okay, really. Here, if you're going to--it hurts bending like this, come up on the sofa at least--"

Sherlock springs up immediately and wedges himself between Joanna and the end of the sofa, a space she would have thought too small for Sherlock to fit all of himself into. His long spider-limbs reach out to catch her, and gently, inexorably, they draw her down to lean on his chest, where he can rest his chin on the top of her head. Somehow, without either hurting her or cramping her, he manages to arrange his arms and legs around her, like a human cage, not designed to keep her in as much as to keep all the rest of the world out.

They don't talk any more that evening, because Joanna falls asleep not long after. Not, after all, to the silence she'd thought was so necessary, but to a low humming, Sherlock's baritone voice reproducing Bach's second partita. It makes no sense, because she hates that piece, and it makes her hair curl every time he plays it on the violin, but just then it is lovely.

Just then, it is enough to soothe every part of her that hurts.

*

Two weeks pass. Peacefully.

Joanna is able to have the stitches out after the first week, and by the middle of the second she's cleared to return to work. Which is fantastic, because she's had to wean herself off the morphine long since, and sitting about the flat, having read anything even remotely interesting and being reduced to watching crap telly, is about to bore a hole right through the center of her sanity.

She isn't quite up to chasing after Sherlock across London in pursuit of criminals yet, but she can tell that he's nearly vibrating out of his skin with the enforced idleness, so she calls Lestrade and tells him it's quite all right, she doesn't need minding anymore, but if he doesn't take Sherlock off her hands one of them is going to murder the other, so around the time Joanna returns to work, Sherlock burst out of the flat like a ball shot from a cannon in pursuit of a bizarre poisoning case in Croydon. Joanna takes half shifts at the surgery, and then full shifts, and she tells herself it's enough. She's not back to her full strength yet, her paid work is quite enough to absorb as much energy as she could possibly have to spare.

The weather is still miserable. Damp, dull, winter-grey. The trees in the park where she has her lunch are stripped down, bone white, skeletal outlines against the dirty sky. She runs her gloveless fingers over the branches, smooth as stone sculptures, and tries to force the sensation, the infinite variety of natural phenomenon, through the blizzard-thick static filling her head.

Sarah comes in to her office to speak to her one morning. She has the names of three different psychiatric trauma specialists, all of them known to her, all of them "not idiots", Sarah promises. There are two women and one man on the list. Joanna hasn't seen Ella in over six months. She smiles and puts the slip of paper in her pocket, where it disintegrates in the next wash.

Joanna leaves work one afternoon to find a car, familiar in its black sleekness, parked, legally this time, in the spot nearest the door. She heaves a deep sigh, but before she even approaches it, the door opens and Anthea steps out. She's holding a shopping bag.

"For court," she says, handing the bag to Joanna. Then she smiles, bends over her BlackBerry, and a second later Joanna's phone chimes.

"My personal number," she says. "Well, one of them. I don't know if you know--I was in the army."

"Were you?" Joanna feels her eyebrows climb to her hairline.

"Not for long." Anthea smiles. "I got recruited to another branch not long into my training. I was in Ulster. There was a situation." She stops, and meets Joanna's eyes. No need for further details, Joanna thinks, not when someone like Anthea says 'situation' with that particular inflection. "If you ever want to talk. I do get free time."

"Right." Joanna smiles. "Loads, I remember."

Joanna goes home that night to an empty flat. She climbs the stairs--haltingly, her leg is troubling her again, of all infuriating things--and goes into her bedroom. On the floor below, through the air vent, she can hear Mrs Hudson puttering around in the kitchen, the smell of a shepherd's pie working its way through the loose Victorian ventilation. Sherlock isn't home. She's never any idea when he'll be home, these days.

Joanna tugs the hem of her blouse free from the waistband of her skirt and undoes the buttons. She's wearing a plain cotton sports bra beneath--life with Sherlock has taught her that it's best not to wear underwear that would outrage what the army has left of her modesty if someone were to, for instance, burst into her room while she's dressing. She bends her head and traces the brilliant pink line of her scar from the left of her navel, across her stomach, up under her bra and over her collar bone. It's shaped like the lifeline of her palm, magnified and transposed to her torso, like a tattoo.

The tickle of her fingertips over the fine hairs of her stomach trigger a flood of images, a release of chemicals, and Joanna shuts her eyes, though she knows perfectly well it won't do a damn thing to stop either.

Martin, telling her that her skin was a map of the world. Martin, curling around her like she was his hope of heaven. Sherlock, cutting through her bonds, his eyes precisely averted from the parts of her body she hadn't given him permission to look at. Sherlock's head in her lap, his tears leaving a damp patch on the hem of her nightshirt.

It is all, as Sherlock had said weeks before, _intolerable_. Joanna Watson was never made to live in her head, and these days it's enemy territory, treacherous as a minefield, and she would know. She's had to navigate both.

Not until she's drawing air raggedly into her lungs does she realize she's stopped breathing for a minute. She scrubs her hands over her face, does up one or two buttons on her blouse, and straightens her not-actually-injured leg on the bed beside her.

She sits back against her pillows, listening to the rain beat an irregular pattern against her window. Then she drags a hand across her mouth, reaches into her bedside table, and takes out her gun. Her kit is on the shelf below the drawer, and she takes that out too, placing the gun and the heavy black case side by side on the mattress in front of her.

She could do this with her eyes closed. Had to, in training. She keeps her eyes open, but works from muscle memory. The steady, precise dismantling of an instrument of death, the careful polishing, the removal of grit and dust, then the reassembling, heavy pieces becoming whole and solid under her hands again.

Joanna puts everything back in the case and puts the case back where it belongs. The gun stays on the bed. She sits without quite looking at it, conscious of the weight of it pressing on the mattress.

It's been a year since she met Sherlock. Just over a year since she returned to England. The hole in her shoulder where the bullet punched through is no longer angry red, but white, faintly pink where it's puckered around the edges. It's funny; she knows Sherlock's always wanted to see it, but he didn't look when he had the chance.

Joanna picks up the gun. It's a satisfying weight in her hand. Muscles and tendons close around it automatically, in a well-remembered formation. She hefts it by the grip, slides her finger around the trigger. The safety's on; she's morbid, but not reckless.

Irresponsible, maybe, but never by accident.

She should get back into training. Go out into the country somewhere and practice. The weight of a military sidearm, like most things in the army, is more suited to the strength of a man's hand and wrist. A woman, especially a small woman like Joanna, can't afford to let those muscles atrophy.

She holds the gun before her, one-handed taking aim at the knob on her closet door. Holds it there, keeping time in her head how long it takes before she starts to feel the strain in her arm. Ten minutes, forty-six seconds. Not terrible.

There are other things she's out of practice with.

She turns the gun around and looks down the hole at the center of the barrel. How long can she do this, before her nerve breaks? Or something else breaks? Her finger is still on the trigger. The safety--

The safety is off. She'd disengaged it without noticing. Muscle memory again. You don't aim a gun at a person unless you are prepared to fire on them. She's a living target. For now, she's a living--

"Joanna."

She is far too well trained to set the gun off in her shock, but the tremors of the suppressed reaction wrack her body. She re-engages the safety and aims the gun barrel down before she turns to look at Sherlock.

Sherlock, whose face is cadaver-grey, the way it had appeared in the dim light of the basement. He's frozen, two steps into her room, one hand reaching toward her, the other in his pocket. Where he keeps his phone.

"Don't--" Joanna chokes. _Don't ever do that to someone holding a loaded gun, you utter wanker. Don't you dare say anything. Don't come any closer._

 _Don't go._

Millimeter by millimeter, Sherlock unfreezes. He lowers one hand, takes the other from his pocket, and takes two slow steps toward her bed, telegraphing his every movement.

When he reaches down to pick up the gun, she doesn't stop him. She hadn't even noticed when it fell from her hand.

Without looking at her, Sherlock opens her bedside drawer and puts the gun back in its place. Joanna sees a tremor pass through his shoulders as he shuts the drawer with a little more force than necessary. He stands there for a second, tracing the scarred wooden surface of the little table with the pads of his fingers. Then he turns and, without invitation, sits on the bed with his legs crossed, facing her.

"You weren't intending to fire," he says. Something in his tone makes Joanna think that he's saying this to reassure himself, not her.

"Well spotted," she says, hoarsely.

"You are scrupulously tidy in your affairs. You would have written letters. Left a stack of them on your bedside table."

 _Oh._ He's telling her--he didn't know for sure, until he put the gun away. Until he saw the empty surface of the table. Joanna's stomach clenches--a sensation between embarrassment, relief, and regret.

"Didn't mean to frighten you," she says.

"I'm not sure that's the word."

They sit without speaking for a few minutes. They are, in fact, full minutes. Joanna's internal clock, set to measure her endurance with the gun, is still ticking away.

"I had observed that there was a pattern to your cleaning your gun," Sherlock says at last. "But I didn't have enough data to conclude what the pattern signified. You make a ritual of it, but not during periods of stress. At least--" She watches the bob of his Adam's apple as he swallows. "Not what ordinary people think of as stress. You, of course, are the opposite of ordinary. I ought to have remembered."

"You tracked it," she says. Bizarrely, she finds herself smiling. "I thought I was being discreet."

"I thought you were ignorant of my drugs use."

Joanna laughs. She draws her good leg up to her chest and leans her forehead against her knee.

"I wouldn't presume," he says, in a careful voice unlike any she's heard him use before, "to know what it's like in your head--"

"Bollocks," says Joanna. "All you ever do is presume."

Sherlock draws in a ragged breath, a bit like a laugh. "All right. I'll tell you, then, and you'll tell me if I go wrong."

Joanna looks up. Sherlock props his elbows on his knees, plonks his chin in his cupped hands. Observes her steadily.

"When everything's normal. When you're _safe_." He infuses the word with as much sarcasm as the lonely syllable can bear. "When everything looks all right to the outside world--that's when the inside of your head goes all sharp edges. You lose your clarity, your focus. Your inner eye dims, like the view though a window in a blizzard."

Joanna breathes in, the noise harsh.

"You remember all the things you least wish to remember. You forget who you are. In your head, you are nothing but the sum of the damage of what _other people_ have done to you. You get--trapped there. You forget what you're capable of. What you've made of yourself, with these hands." He reaches down and curls his fingers around hers, lightly. "So you do what you must. To remember."

Joanna shakes her head. "You are brilliant," she says. "I know I've said it, but it bears repeating."

Sherlock, looking down at her hands, smiles. "In this case, my powers of deduction are of only secondary value. I believe this is what you would call empathy."

Joanna shakes her head, smiling ruefully, and Sherlock seems to read something in the expression. "You aren't surprised," he says. "You always knew. That we were alike, in this way."

"I tried to tell you."

"I didn't hear, at the time. Emotions are dangerous for me, Joanna. They cloud my observations. You _understood_ me. I was overwhelmed. It never occurred to me to wonder how anyone could see into me so clearly."

"Doesn't matter." She shrugs. "We understand each other now."

"You didn't want me to stop Martin. You'd been on edge for weeks. The danger he presented gave you something you needed."

"It was still irresponsible. Stupid."

Sherlock's hands tighten around hers. He picks them up. Joanna doesn't resist as he brings them to his lips and kisses the palms, then turns them over and kisses the back of each knuckle.

"If I were as generous as you are, I would say that I have no wish to interfere with what you do to keep yourself sane." His thumbs massage delicate circles into the insides of her wrists. Joanna shudders. "But I can't say that. I need you. I need you too much to let some filthy little man cut you open and put his hands on you--"

Joanna rises up on her knees, wraps her arms around Sherlock's neck, and kisses him. He cradles the back of her head with his hands, then tears his lips from hers and kisses the side of her throat, the joint of her shoulder. His lips find the macerated flesh of her bullet wound scar, and Joanna digs her fingers into the muscles of his back. He groans, and she rests her chin on his shoulder. For a moment, they simply breathe together, and it is _glorious_.

"We'll--return to this, I trust," Sherlock says, in a hoarse voice. "But I came up to tell you, I--we have a case. I need you."

Joanna laughs into the fine, thin fabric of his shirt. Her arms tighten around him. "God, yes," she says.


End file.
